


The Son of Dawn's Rebirth

by awinter



Category: Dune Series - Frank Herbert, Wheel of Time - Robert Jordan
Genre: Parody, Pastiche, Source parody, botox
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2020-06-30 14:54:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 46,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19855486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awinter/pseuds/awinter
Summary: Dune references are in chapter 7 if that's what you're here for. Dream sequences start in 3. Initiations / hazings are in 6 & 7, and ordered time rips loose in 8.This is the Eye of the World reassembled from a collage of its original sources.70s sci-fi, 80s horror films, prayer, word roots and original myth combine and form the dusty road to Armageddon.Any phrase that sounds copied is, but not from where you think.





	1. Morlocks Ruin Homecoming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With their only real competition in morlock cookpots, Marathon High is set to go to state for the first time in a generation, but not if the whole starting bench quits town.

### A town, a dream

Dawn points, and another day prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind wrinkles and slides. I am here or there or elsewhere, in my beginning. Memory fades or is destroyed in periodic bouts of madness and self-disgust. What remains is like a tapestry holed and flimsy with age (torn, too, here and there, in senile rage), through which one must stare forever at the great void.

A locker room.

At the heart of the doab, the interfluve, in Aymon’s Field, on homecoming weekend before the biggest game of their lives, the sons of Aymon knelt in prayer and prepared to face their ancient enemies, the South Milbank Rattlers, in holy combat.

Left tackle Jacob Black and running-back Lemmy Caution, neither much for prayer, passed the time with flipping coins.

“Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads.” Lemmy, taking a break from counting his streak, looked around the room at his teammates, each one in front of his locker with hands clasped. “There is an art to the building up of suspense.”

“Though it can be done by luck alone,” Jacob said. “We have been spinning coins together since –” He stopped. He seemed not to remember.

“This is not the first time we’ve spun coins,” Lemmy agreed.

Randall Thorpe, starting quarterback and their sometimes friend, clasped his rosary so tight it marked the skin of his palm. Highly susceptible to hypnosis, he had long-since crossed through prayer to past-life memories.

His eyes flickered REM saccades under their lids. Randall whispered what he saw: “Servile hands unsheath the sword on fiery Etna’s slopes.”

“Glean what afflicts him,” Lemmy urged Jacob.

“How?”

“Question and answer,” Lemmy said. “Old ways are the best ways.”

Randall’s dream subsided and he came out of it. He opened his eyes slowly and smiled when he saw them by him. “Good lads how do you both?”

### C’est moi

The home team boiled out of the gate onto the field. The floodlights blared like trumpets, the crowd opened their mouths and roared like bass drums. Beyond the bleachers, in the parking lot, Paddy Fein the Peddler tended his concession cart and stroked his sleek goatee, anticipating unctuously the events of the night. The wicker man waited empty to be lit on fire for Beltane.

The band tuned up. The lead man, Tommy Merda, gave a count. “One, two.” It was a hot night. “One, two, three, four.” They started into the national anthem, and a few of the spectators rose.

A player from the other team walked out onto the field too early, before the anthem was over, drawing boos from the crowd.

The boos faded to hushed concern. The opposing player’s balance was off; as he stared up at the blinding lights, blood seeped down from his helmet to stain his eyes. He fell forward and the crowd saw embedded in his back a hideous scythe, cruelly hooked, the metal rusty and pitted.

The band played to a ragged halt. A different sound built in the echoing bowels of the stadium, a wailing and gnashing of teeth, the sound of every farm animal barking or bleating at once.

They poured from the enemy gate: hideous mutant morlocks, human-animal hybrids, violent and entirely stupid, vilde chaya with horns and muzzles and beaks. Raised underground with a taste for human flesh and no access to salt or pepper. Pure cannibal hunger was the only thing driving them.

Filthy farm implements cut football pads like butter. Several hours having passed since lunch, the morlocks were highly motivated and the home team was as digestible to their mixed-up gullets as anything else in this flyspeck town.

A dark and deadly marsh troll wheeled madly at the center of it all, long coat and top-hat imitating his master, black parasol shielding his pale skin from the hot lights. Completely blind, he directed his ravenous troops with supple wrists, discerning the lay of the field by intuition and sense of smell.

As the number of uneaten players decreased, morlocks climbed the bleachers to feed on raw townspeople with their raptor beaks, wolves’ teeth, or brutish goat molars.

On stage, Tommy Merda had his guitarist switch to fiddle.

Jacob Black and Lemmy Caution fell into their usual roles despite the carnage, Jacob taking hits for Randall and Lemmy finding his way to clear space. Jacob was grappling the horns of a sort of minotaur when Randall heard the first bars of the music and got his second wind. He grabbed a spear from a morlock that was running by and dropped the minotaur in one thrust.

Jacob stood panting, his shadow from the field lights sharp and stark in seven directions. Randall passed him the spear as he prepared to snatch another weapon. “They’re hybrids,” Randall said. “With their halves barely attached. Go for the seams!”

An ostrich with human arms and elephant’s teeth ran past armed with a pitchfork; Randall took its weapon with little trouble.

“Johnny don’t you ever know,” Tommy moaned in the microphone. “That time keeps marching on.”

The two boys cut a path to Lemmy. With all three armed, they stood back to back, defending their section of the field. A tiger-clawed, zebra-headed morlock scored Jacob’s shoulder pads. “We are entitled to some direction, I would have thought.”

“We’re outnumbered,” Randall said. “Try to rally the defenders.”

“If there are any left,” Lemmy muttered. He raised his voice to cut across the carnage. “Sons of Aymon!” he called. “Marathon High! To me!”

Nobody came. The boys’ weapons, snatched from the attackers with quick hands, could only be used to strike, not to parry; the rotten alloy was fatigued to breaking and a single hard hit reduced it to powder. They were running out of replacements, and the morlocks with hooves and claws had the advantage unarmed.

From the stage, “The darkest moment of the night –”

A white-hot maser beam slashed out from the bleachers and liquefied three morlocks in a line, leaving a greasy vapor with notes of tart metal and wet dog.

Behind the maser’s afterimage, a short lady meandered onto the field. She had the smooth brow of a serious botox habit and bore in her hand a grail relic. She raised it again – another spread of napalm and maser-fire rained onto the morlocks, barbecuing some and slicing others into neat cubes. She also used the relic’s sharp edges as a sort of knife to slit morlock scalps for their bounty.

The relic’s shape in this reality was that of a potsherd and looked fragile, but it was made of durable celluloid and it could be cleaned in the dishwasher at home.

With her came an older gentleman, athletic but gray and with a paunch. His cloak was of good fabric, and woven with odd mathematical designs which seemed to ebb and flow in the receding light. Underneath he wore an old white tank top long since greened by rank nicotinic sweat.

He ran just ahead of the rain of fire, dodging the beams by experience but mostly by luck, puncturing morlocks like water balloons and spinning like a dervish.

He sang a song or battle cry as he danced and hewed away. In the rare event his weapon was parried by the morlocks’ dark blades it blew white sparks and shattered them, weakened as they were from neutron damage.

The lady’s maser was losing charge; instead of cutting or dissolving the morlocks it cooked them, braising off their fur and raising shiny, puckered blisters.

A crocodile-headed morlock cracked like an egg in the microwave and the camouflaged gray-hair dashed through the space in the horde, downing a giraffe-legged morlock by cutting off the legs. For the man the fight was like a choreographed musical number and as he jumped and spun through the field he was shouting enthusiastically in ancien regime french.

Finally he came close enough for the boys to hear his battle cry: “C’est moi! C’est moi!”

He grinned at them and sliced off an enemy’s kneecaps with a windmill move. It folded in his grisly wake.

### The port-a-john

All the morlocks were dead. The mire-troll was still stumbling and wheeling around the field but was harmless as long as you kept your distance.

The cloaked gray-hair was dripping gore; the maser-bearing lady put her grail relic away and wiped the soot off her hands.

A representative of the town fathers cautiously approached the deadly duo. It was Weaver the Thatcher, the town roofer, with his copy of the Malum Maleficarum held ahead of him.

“Much obliged for your help,” Weaver said. “But we’ve voted to burn you as a witch.”

The gray-hair flipped his sodden cloak over his shoulder to free his sword arm. Gore painted the faces of the traumatized front-row parents. “Aha,” he said.

“Eat hot maser, sir,” the lady told Weaver politely.

The mayor came waddling in from the main gate under the stands. “Wait!” he called. “Not yet!” He puffed to a halt. “We found one more of them in the parking lot, please,” the mayor said, dry-washing his hands.

“Hey you!” The lady said. Some volunteers had started wheelbarrowing the bodies to the town dump. “Can you hose my friend off?”

The mayor waved to get her attention. “In the parking lot, please.”

“Yes,” she said, “just aim the hose at him and –”. A blast of water shot gristle off the gray-hair’s cloak onto the lady and the town fathers.

She blinked and turned to the mayor. “Yes, the parking lot. Just one? Kill it.”

“It’s blockaded itself in.”

She allowed herself to be led out to the vast empty lot, asphalt cracked by weeds, that circled the stadium, where someone had sharpie’d Baron Saturday’s top-hat onto the door of a port-a-potty. She picked up a piece of loose pavement and threw it at the door in lieu of knocking.

There was a grunt inside. From the crowd came gasps. Someone chanted “Baron Saturday is trapped in Sheol, in adamant bonds infrangible.”

“One minute!” came a brutish, half-animal voice from inside.

“I knew it,” she said to Weaver. “Human flesh really messes with their insides.”

“I thought they were made for it.”

“Badly made,” she said. “They’re like pandas, herbivores with the colon of an obligate carnivore. It’s proof they were constructed rather than developing naturally.”

Weaver smiled and nodded himself into the background. “Are you alright please, lady?” the mayor asked the lady.

She was pale and sweating. “Just something I ate, I think.” She clutched her stomach. “Or the proximity of this creature. The very _air_ stinks.”

(“And what floats in water?”, Weaver was whispering to some of the townspeople; a crowd had gathered.)

A brief rumbling, sourceless but close, culminated in a loud pop, and an awful penetrating stench. “Oh sweet chili cheese fries,” the lady whispered. “It’s coming up.”

The weaker townsfolk retreated. “What is that, please?” asked the mayor, nose closed and breathing through his shirt.

“The earth hath bubbles,” the lady said cryptically. “As the water has, and these are of them.” She had a lighter and, holding it before her like a talisman, ripped open the door to the port-a-john.

A morlock lay in wait within. “Wait in line”, he said. “Those chili cheese fries –”

She tossed the lighter into the toilet. The sump caught and the portapotty climbed into the air on its burning fumes like a rocket. As everyone backed away and covered their heads, she turned calmly, wiped her hands, and burped once.

The burning shell of the portapotty fell to earth behind her, hissing and roaring with blue methane flame.

### Triage

Weaver the Thatcher led them to the airport Hilton, where the survivors had set up an emergency hospital.

“We don’t hold truck with doctors around here,” Weaver was saying to the lady, “but in the absence of a physician we have a sort of midwife person.”

They were greeted at the entrance by the mayor’s daughter, Egg Ween, a youth who did not yet even wear the braid. The adult women all braided their hair; their bulky, intricately arranged hairstyles served the crucial purpose of providing static support to their necks, which would otherwise be the thinnest and structurally weakest part.

The lady, smoking grail relic still in hand, introduced herself as Morainn, one of the Ageless Sensei. “And my man is Lance.” There were handshakes and greetings all around. “But enough of that – take me to the sickest.”

Egg Ween led them to a carpeted conference room set up with cots. At a work table, volunteers were grinding up plants with a thick fleshy and often forked root. “Give me to drink mandragora,” a patient moaned.

“That’s Nimue,” Egg said at the end of the long room. “The Bane of Merlin. She’s doing her best,” she said apologetically. They moved quietly closer.

Nimue was extracting a morlock molar from someone’s upper thigh. She was murmuring to her patient as she went. “I chose a time,” she said. “I made a pattern, for thee as for me … a rested pattern, a whole pattern, a pattern without flaw. Within its limits – and it has them – it will restore thee, as thee was, so far as it has substance to work with.”

Morainn watched, her eyes sparkling, her fingers stroking her chin as if there were a goatee there.

“There will be no scars,” Nimue crooned. “Nothing to remind thee.”

“Enough with that,” the patient said. “Just have it out of me!”

* * *

Later Morainn found the three boys trying to jimmy a vending machine. Her man Lance was trooping three paces behind, morosely, still dripping dilute morlock bile in a soupy trail.

“I saw you boys on the field. Nice work.”

They hadn’t noticed her enter. Their heads all turned, reluctantly. “Thanks,” Lemmy said. “Got any change?”

“I might,” Morainn said, “I just might at that.” She jerked her head and Lance handed her a coin purse. “What have you got there curing on the drying rack?”

Jacob Black was the outdoorsiest of them and had set this up. “Those are morlock scalps,” he said, “and they’re ours.”

“Ever seen one of these?” Morainn took out three coins and held one up, letting it flash in the light. “The great serpent.”

She had their attention.

“The emblem of the Ivory Tower is 170,000 years old,” she said, “and is one of the first symbols used by people to signify God and life.”

“Will it spend?” Lemmy asked. Morainn shrugged. The boys used eye contact to negotiate among themselves and finally nodded. Jacob strung together the still-wet scalps and handed them over. They took three coins in exchange.

They tried them in the vending machine and cheered when they got a moon pie out of it. Morainn watched them through the glass, her eyes still and cool but stroking her chin so hard it turned red.

* * *

Randall’s dad was in the hospital too. “You did fine without, but here’s my old stuff anyway.” He handed over a bundle.

Randall opened it; and belted on what he found inside. “You sure man?” It was a sword with the hilt emblem defaced.

“Looks good on you pal.”

### The selection of the horses

The lady lured them into the hotel’s stable by promising she knew why the morlocks came to town.

“We’re here,” Randall said.

The lady consciously avoided touching her chin; she knew it was her tell. She ended up rubbing loose skin off her face; the port-a-john explosion had given her a sunburn.

“Somebody’s targeting young boys,” she said.

“Bye,” Lemmy said.

“Stop them,” she said.

Her man Lance, his cloak a walking kaleidescope that made the boys carsick, was leaning on the wall. He cracked a beer. “No backtalk.” He didn’t move but he showed them his sword belt. He was mostly dry but still smelled like an enadangered species barbeque.

“As long as you’re here in town they’re going to keep coming for you,” Morainn said.

“It’s not that simple,” Randall said. “We’re the core of the team. With the Rattlers all injured or cannibalized by those trollops –”

“Morlocks,” Lance corrected.

“– that counts as a win on our record. We can go to state this year!”

“If you stay this will keep happening!”

“We don’t believe you,” Jacob said. “Maybe they showed up because you attacked them.” Everyone looked at him funny and he sensed that he had said something wrong again. He reminded himself to think before speaking.

“Trust me,” Morainn said, closing her eyes and calming herself with firm strokes of her chin. “For you three, the season is over.”

“We’ll have to ask our dads,” Randall said.

“No dads!” Lance said from behind them, wiping foam from his three-day beard with a sound like sandpaper. Randall’s hand went to his new sword and froze short of the handle. He remembered an image of Lance bursting through the split halves of a morlock like the kool-aid man coming through a wall. Lance chuckled crudely. “That’s what I thought.”

“We’ll have to get our stuff,” Lemmy said, hoping to escape.

“No stuff,” Morainn said. “We leave now before that mire-troll finds the exit.”

“I killed the mire-troll,” Tommy Merda said from the door. “You’re welcome.”

Lance grimaced. “They’re not easy to kill. How’d you do it?”

“I shot its parasol away with the hose,” Tommy said. “The floodlamps took care of the rest.”

Morainn threw up her hands, exasperated. “If everyone who killed a mire-troll wants to come we’ll never be out of here!”

“I don’t –”. He shook his head and shut up. He wasn’t allowed to accept _or_ turn down work without his agent. She had almost trapped him.

“Are there enough horses?” Lance asked.

“I can ride Bella,” Jacob said quickly. Behind him, Lemmy was making throat cut motions and shaking his head; Lance got the hint.

Someone pushed Tommy out of the doorway. “Hey.” It was Egg Ween. “Make that one extra – I’m coming too.”

Lance couldn’t find her at first because she was so short. “What did you kill?” he asked.

“Nothing yet,” she said, brandishing a can of hairspray and a lit zippo. Morainn grinned and Lance frowned approvingly. “I’ll ride Bella,” she said. Jacob shrugged and Lemmy relaxed.

“Bella may not be as fast as the others,” Randall warned.

Jacob turned on him. “Don’t talk that way about her!”

Morainn ground her teeth.

In the end they settled it with Egg on Bella, Jacob on Bayard because of his size and well apart from Bella in the lineup, Tommy on reliable old Methuselah, Randall on Ajax (for whom he was named, sort of), Lemmy on a skulker named Fly-By-Night because his usual mount Fox was in the shop, Lance with his bonny warhorse Man’o’War which won the Derby, and of course Morainn on Aldebaron.

* * *

The group, now seven strong with Tommy and Egg, made good time once they settled who rode what and made it to the road. There was little traffic at this time of night.

“How did you guys know how to fight like that?” Lemmy asked after a while.

“You did, too,” Randall said. “Have you been training on the side?”

Lemmy shook his head. “It was like something awakened in my blood. Not of lessons learned for the first time, but like old skills set aside and now, in need, picked up again.”

“Marathon,” Morainn said, “has always been the name of this place, you know. Even in ancien regime french.” She taught them more of it, and each word seemed to awaken five more from where they slept in the back of a mind that was now, they decided, sharing brain space and nerve endings with their own.

Looking up, they saw something large and pale high in the sky, gliding in a southwesterly direction toward the Oseen Hills. It was naked and seemed to be gliding on skin stretched between its limbs and torso.

Lance cleared his throat. “I see it,” Morainn said, calm for once.

It swooped down and flapped slowly to pace them on the road, lazily catching up.

“What’s that it’s saying?” Jacob asked. “I can almost understand it.”

The others shared glances. They could understand it quite clearly. It was moaning “kiiiiisss, kiisss”.

Lemmy flipped around in his saddle to watch it, fascinated. “Slow bugger, isn’t he.” He shot it with his bow and they continued down the road, if not better then at least wiser for the day’s weird events.


	2. The Jewel in the Lotus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Overdosing, body snatching, and meditation soundtracking are among the challenges the kids face as they try to do some sightseeing in Mashhad. Ancient proverbs take flesh. Commence explosion dodging.

### Trial lesson

It wasn’t just allergies – there were tears on every face as they crossed the bridge out of the interfluve region and left home in the official and symbolic way recognized by every culture with sufficient riparian rights. The river clucked and babbled beneath them, sleek and glossy in the night.

“Is it true that you can’t go home again?” Egg asked.

The grey-beards among them nodded sagely. Morainn shrugged and unlimbered her grail relic. The potsherd had finally cooled from its plentiful use during the game. The morlocks had caught up again; they were thundering down the highway.

“I don’t know about that one,” Morainn said, brandishing her grail relic. She burned a bullseye target on the midpoint of the bridge with a hair-thin beam of maser-fire; the perspective was off but it would do. “They also say you can’t cross the same river twice.”

The slavering hybrids hammered their hooves and paws on the poor bridge. When they reached the midpoint Morainn shouted “Pow!” and a tree of lightning splintered the air, slicing the bridge in half, impaling some morlocks, and dumping the uncooked pursuers into deep running water.

The group rode on. Jacob stayed for a while looking at the scorched foundation of the ruined bridge until one of his friends called his name and he eased his horse out of neutral. “Ohhh,” he said after a while. “That proverb finally makes sense.”

* * *

Lance found them a campsite away from the road. Most of the kids had never had indoor heating and were fine outside. Tommy was on the phone with his agent trying to get a hotel and explain why he was missing his next three bookings.

Egg edged around the fire to where Morainn was flossing. “That thing with the, barbecueing of the troll-orcs –”

“– morlocks,” Lance corrected.

“– I watched you from the bleachers. Can I learn how?”

Morainn finished, dropped her floss pick on the ground in contravention of the campsite signage, and spat. She maintained uncomfortable eye contact with Egg Ween the whole time as a lesson not to interrupt future flossing sessions. “It can’t be learned,” she said finally. “It’s a kind of mendelian thing.”

(“Medallion?” Lemmy says in the background, briefly tuning in).

“If you have the gene we call you sayyadina and you can become a sensei like me.”

Egg chewed on this for a while. “So what do you need some of my saliva or something to test?” Lemmy cracked a joke about the number of people who have a sample of Egg’s saliva.

Egg and Morainn sat yoga-style across from each other on the ground. Morainn shifted one leg a little because beneath the mask of botox she was not so young.

“Yang, the burning mirror, gathers fire energy from the sun.” Morainn drew a circle in the air, unhelpfully. “Yin, the moon mirror, gathers dew from the moon.”

“Yin and yang share a common chi and move each other.” Lance cued up 400 hz chanting on spotify without being told.

“Laserbeams,” Egg prompted.

“Close your eyes and imagine the jewel in the lotus.”

“Laserbeams.”

“The jewel in the lotus.”

Egg sighed. “What does a lotus look like?” she asked, with her eyes closed. Lance chuckled. The 400 hz track ended and, on schedule for the lesson, it advanced to “om mani padme hum”.

Egg started to feel it. The inner freedom from the practical desire, the release from action and suffering, release from the inner and the outer compulsion, yet surrounded by a grace of sense, a white light still and moving. Erhebung without motion, concentration without elimination.

“That’s right,” Morainn said. “You can feel the light burning your eyes. Keep them tightly closed. That’s fine.” Egg could sense the glare behind her lids. There seemed no point in moving until Morainn shut out the sun, the dazzling white shape that had appeared over the tops of the trees.

After a while her face relaxed. Morainn watched her, from time to time stroking her chin but no pinching; all was peace.

Egg’s eyes opened, briefly, and cinder-bright pupils shot buzzing plasma in a broad fan, slicing the tops off some nearby trees. Morainn’s blue energy shield blushed red to boil off the energy. Lance, his middle-aged reflexes augmented by powerful prescription stimulants, ducked.

“Three-two-one-wake!” Morainn said quickly. Egg’s face grew troubled and she contorted her forehead to try to open her eyes again.

Morainn put down her tea and clapped twice, Egg Ween exhaled, and blinked, twice, normally.

“What happened?”

Randall pointed at a burning tree. Egg whistled. “So now what? I can fry morlocks too?”

“Hoooo.” Morainn blew a raspberry and Lance nodded agreement. “This stuff is driven by a small heroin gland next to your pituitary. If you use it too much you’ll OD.”

Randall perked up. “Can men produce heroin too?”

Morainn rubbed her neck. “Uhhh sort of.” Randall said nothing and Morainn filled the uncomfortable silence with information. “You’d produce crack. If you’re even a carrier of the gene.”

“Which I’m not,” Randall said.

“Obviously,” Morainn agreed.

“Is crack worse than heroin?” Jacob asked.

Lance chuckled. Morainn shot him a psychic prod. “We’re not sure it’s more addictive, but you’ll do more time. Steer clear.”

### Juicing the horses

Morainn and Egg were often together, reciting the rhymes that comprised her vocabulary, practising the scraps of meaningless dialogue and lists of nonexistent cities which seemed to be her keys to the Past.

They evaded morlock pursuit through the day. The main threat was the running-type hybrids. One mix that had proven particularly tenacious had the forequarters of a lion, the deadly tail and hindgut of a hippopotamus, and the snapping jaws of a big old croc.

The horses could outrun it, especially the expensive models driven by Morainn and Lance, but Bella, poor pony, was not the equal of those two beasts, even carrying tiny Egg. Jacob worried about her constantly and knew the animal was going to fade long before they could make camp.

The mare would die. If they were harried much farther, the little beast would go down under Egg. He hurt for her: the blood in him loved horses too well to use them so.

Lance growled. “I’m calling a rest.” He threw some squirrel hearts and other offal from last night’s dinner onto the road to distract the galloping morlock and they pulled over at the next rest stop.

Lemmy’s dad used to drag him to the races when he was little so he checked Bella out when they were all down. He shook his head. “This is bad, man.”

Egg pled with Morainn. “Is there nothing to do?”

Morainn stroked her chin. “Even the oldest and weakest animal could be made as swift as Brunellus if you feed him the herb satirion and grease his thighs with stag fat.”

Jacob, useful for once, had several slabs of stag fat draped about his person. “Now for the herbs,” Morainn said. “Anyone?” They shrugged. Given the state of medical technology, it seemed like an omission that nobody in their party had any herbs on hand.

Lance, on his third warm beer since lunch and mostly lucid, waggled his eyebrows. “There is a place the morlocks will not go.”

The kids perked up. “Some sort of safe, walled city?” Randall said. “A casino,” Lemmy suggested.

Morainn shook her head grimly. She tapped the air as if she were used to having a blackboard there. “Morlocks are mutant hybrids barely holding it together, genetically speaking. They won’t come near this place.”

“ _Which_ place,” Egg begged of her.

“The extra dose of radiation would end them,” Morainn said.

The kids were horrified. “It’s safe for us, right?” Egg asked.

Morainn shrugged. “Whatever you do, _don’t_ talk to strangers.”

### The Great Smog

The city was covered with a most dense mist. Morainn gave its name as Mashhad and filled in historical bullet points about ancient military alliances and scientific breakdowns.

All the stones were brittle and decayed. “How could this happen?” Lemmy asked.

“Pea soup fogs plus acidic oxides, when burned off by the sun, turned into a haze of concentrated sulfuric acid.” She knocked on a wall and a piece of it collapsed. The fog was particulate, sullen, smelling of lemons.

The boys felt safe from the morlocks and left camp to do some sightseeing. Morainn wasn’t in a mood to play tour guide but lent them her copy of ibn-Battuta and they picked the tomb of Ali al-Ridha to see the architecture and the nesting hoopoes there.

It was far larger than the airport hilton back home and in their minds entirely worth the difficult journey. Jacob had made a football out of a spare possum the night before and they inflated it now and threw it around the plaza. The moon above them was serene with argent-lidded eyes.

Heading back, columns of radon gas boiled from the vents like steam pipes under maintenance. The radioactive vapor poured lazily out from a broken tube and filled the crossing with a greenish mist. The fog thickened and smelled of rotting fruit. Visibility was bad; as you walk the streets create themselves around you.

A grotesque shape began to form in the cold air above the shattered deck, like a crude figure of a man projected somehow on a puff of steam. They hurried past.

At the next corner a delightful gentleman popped out and brightened the atmosphere considerably. “Hey fellers!” He took a deep drink from a green glass bottle he carried in one of his hands. It went ‘glug’. The other hand was also holding a green glass bottle, the latter as yet unopened. His cape was green felt and underneath he was dressed like the Riddler, but subtler.

Randall drew his sword and accidentally threw it.

“Whoops! Butterfingers,” the stranger said. He hiccuped. He bent to get the sword and capered over to hand it back.

“Thank you,” Randall said, taking it back, suddenly realizing that he was holding a very large, very sharp knife that he had no idea how to even hold safely. He broke into a sweat as he carefully angled it back into the flaccid holster. It was his first time drawing it.

The stranger giggled like Mozart and took another drink. Randall watched this time and saw that the bottle was not, in fact, green – it was made of clear glass with thick green wine inside it.

It was a nice night. Nobody was in a particular rush and they watched for a few minutes as Randall got the sword back in without removing any fingers.

“I helped you get back something of yours,” the stranger said, plaintively.

Lemmy and Jacob shared a glance, grinning at the odd man. “Yeah, thanks,” Randall said. “Again.”

“Can you help me get back something of mine?” the man begged.

“I don’t think it works like that,” Lemmy said.

“Oh,” and the cheerful stranger’s face fell. “If you’re going then, would you do me one last favor?” They made the mistake of hesitating. “Kill me. Bludgeon my face in.” He seemed so sad suddenly. “Put me to sleep with your kind boot.”

Randall looked at the others. They shrugged. “Fine,” he said generously. “We’ve got some time.”

“Hic!” Back to cheerful. “It’s just through this dark archway.” The boys edged past him; his eyes were crossed and he wasn’t getting out of the way to let them in. When Lemmy passed he squeezed his arm with the demeanor of someone assessing livestock. His voice changed to a sort of quiet growl. “I’ll hurt you real bad when we get inside.”

Lemmy felt weird about the tone but didn’t hear well enough to understand. “Hmm?”

“Nothing! Ahahaha.” The stranger coughed a miserable damp cough and hiccuped in the middle, spinning off balance and catching himself on the wall.

“What’s your name?” Randall called back through the pitch-black, echoing hall.

“Neamhordaithe,” the stranger said. “But you can call me – hic! – Neamhordaithe.” He laughed. “I answer to many names.”

Lemmy whistled. They emerged into a glittering hidey-hole of cash and drugs. Gem-encrusted weapons, ivory miniatures on black velvet, Russian machine guns, and wrapped bricks of puro dope vied for cramped space in a dim plaza or yard. Useless mood lighting was provided by lava lamps.

“And you need help carrying this?” Randall asked. The story seemed thin now and he was regretting being in this narrow alley.

“Just to the gate”, Neamhordaithe said. He grabbed Lemmy’s arm again. Lemmy was feeling pretty bad now, with the urging and then the vile feeling he had had of the look in Neamhordaithe’s eyes, a feverish anxiousness that had wanted something of him, a touch that had twice sunk cruelly into his arm.

“Let’s ditch,” Randall said.

“He won’t let go of me,” Lemmy said.

“I must ruin this present body of mine,” Neamhordaithe said. “Enough to die; but you – you will only seem to fall for a moment. Do not fear; you will not suffer.”

Lemmy got a gray lead- or pewter-looking knife from the stack and stuck Neamhordaithe with it in the gut. Instead of groaning and bleeding, he exploded into a shower of cremation grit which got in their clothes and hair.

“Wow,” Lemmy said. “Uhh – yeah, let’s ditch.” He stuck the knife in his belt. The space seemed to grow darker when his fingers once brushed the blade.

* * *

They were sugared-up and full of their victory when they got back to the team’s camp in an abandoned marble porch area. A fast ticking ascended into a rasping croak when the boys crossed the threshold. “Stop,” Morainn called in her drill-sergeant listen-up-kids voice.

She took up her geiger counter and scanned each boy in turn, coming back to Lemmy. “Wait at the threshold until we have this sorted. What did you pick up? God forbid you ate anything.”

They stepped all over each other telling their story. Morainn shook her fist and pointed at them sequentially. “Don’t. Talk to. Strangers. I asked you to do one thing.”

“But we took care of him,” Lemmy complained.

“It’s said that Neamhordaithe is immortal, renewing his youth by taking life from others, and that he would never die so long as he could find unfortunates on whom to practice this.”

“Immortal? I did him, though,” Lemmy said.

“It is no light thing to take another body. I am not sure myself quite how it is done, although I think that I know.” Morainn brushed at the dark grit on Lemmy’s shoulder and ground it between her fingers. “It is ugly: the body must come from someone, you see.”

Egg Ween was horrified. “Could you – live by this means, if you wished?”

“Yes,” she answered her.

“Have you?” Randall followed up.

Morainn, agitated but botox brow smooth, had moved on to other topics in her mind. “Wait in the street so you don’t contaminate us.” The boys obeyed her, stepping back one pace from the porch.

The cremation grit on their clothes lifted as if animated by static charge and drifted down to the street. The boys breathed relief. They combed through their hair with their hands to get clean.

The particles lifted and spun tighter into a narrow vortex. Morainn returned, standing at the threshold. “What is this?”

“That’s not you?” Randall asked. She shook her head mutely. A familiar falsetto cackle could be heard distantly on the wind.

“Run,” she said. “If we get split up I’ll meet you in Camelon.”

The kids ran in all directions.

### To live is to be hunted

Lance emerged from a city gate and waved Morainn out when the coast was clear. They had their horses but none of the kids.

Morainn blew out a raspberry. “Back to square one.”

Then she froze. She sensed something on the wind. It was familiar and annoying to her but she couldn’t place it. Finally Lance accessed it through their psychic link and gave it name. “Squirrel guts?”

“Whoever that is,” Morainn said loudly, “I’m going to agent orange the foliage in a second.”

Nimue the Bane of Merlin rode out from the bushes. Her horse – if it had been a car it would have been an ancient hatchback, maintained only when it broke down, hardy in its way but prone to stubbornness when not driven just right, syringe caps and other detritus of medical practice covering the passenger seat, an elaborate mix of clean and dirty laundry claiming the second row.

“Ah,” said Morainn, “the doctor from Aymon’s Field.”

Lance was flabbergasted. “You … tracked us? How?”

Nimue carried two pouches at her belt, hastily made from a single medium-sized possum she caught during her ride. She threw the heavier pouch in from of Lance’s horse; it opened, spilling magotty guts and pruned-up squirrel hearts. “Remember these?”

Morainn throttled the air. “I told you to mind our trail.”

The smaller bag Nimue tossed to Morainn, who smelled it and made a face. She opened the drawstring – within lay a collection of what looked like animal bones.

“Possum baculi?” Lance guessed.

“They’re floss picks,” Nimue said. “Did you misplace them?”

“That’s not all I’ve misplaced,” Morainn said.

Nimue took a moment to understand and then gasped. “The young boys from the village?”

“We should take her with us,” Lance said. “We could use a good tracker.”

Morainn nodded. “We need you,” she said to Nimue. “They need you. You must.”

“Thee will not appoint thyself my conscience,” Nimue said. “Thee is not qualified. And thee is not entitled.”

Morainn paused, then shrugged, and rode on. “Wait!” Lance called after her.

“They are far along the road to the Past in her village,” Morainn said over her shoulder. “And it is hard for them to concentrate for long.”

“We need her skill,” Lance said. Morainn pointed at him and prodded the psychic link. Against his will, moving like claymation, Lance nudged the throttle on his horse and followed her at a walk.

“Wait,” Nimue begged Lance.

He painfully turned his head, as if his bones were fighting his muscles. “The blood-bond gives the Ageless Senseis almost complete control over their followers,” Lance said. “Body and soul.”

When they were out of sight, Nimue braided her long hair in a single plait down the back, tied it with a bit of yarn from her fringed skirt. When she was done, she slammed her horse directly into second gear (something was bent or misaligned in the transmission that made it hard to start in first) and followed.


	3. Put your trust in god but keep your powder dry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After a narrow escape from the Quaker army the kids trade the last of their wine for an urgent assist. Meanwhile, Lilith is back up to her original tricks.

### Nothing is better for thee, than me

In the pre-dawn, they ascended the ridge and snuck up on the army camp. Jacob licked a finger and put it up.

“What are you doing?” Egg whispered.

“I’m trying to establish the direction of the wind.”

“There isn’t any,” she said.

“In that case, the origin. Trace it to its source and it might give us a rough idea of the way we came in.”

When the group became separated outside Mashhad, Jacob had defended Bella with total rage and devotion, and by happenstance, also Egg Ween, who had been assigned Bella as her mount. They had ridden straight out and had no idea where the others were.

Now they’d run into a military encampment of some kind; the industrious soldiers were up early cooking breakfast and the intoxicating smell of oatmeal was torture to the hungry kids. Laundry-lines held clothes of modest design and sturdy fabric, without ruffles or lace, clipped up with sprung clothespins. What furniture there was outside the tents was plain in style, durable-looking and functional.

One soldier, eyes down, was sweeping out his tent with a flat broom.

“I think they’re Quakers,” Egg whispered. Something went ‘click’ near her head.

“Good guess,” said the man holding the gun on her. “Now who are you?”

“Easy,” Jacob said. Something went click against his arm.

“Hi,” said a grinning face behind him.

“Easy now,” Jacob said. “There’s no need for violence.”

“Why are you spying on our camp?” asked one of the soldiers.

“We got separated from our group and we smelled your delightful breakfast.”

Bella whickered or neighed or made a standard horse noise. Something went click near her head.

“Easy,” Jacob said again, but there was also an animal sound coming from his throat. He suddenly felt all three of the soldiers around him as hot bags of blood; as each pulse of their hearts sent fresh blood through their bodies, so slowly, like maple syrup through the tree, he heard and smelled it moving.

Jacob’s own heart was going a mile a minute, two beats to their one. Bump-bump. Bump. He couldn’t stand it any longer. “Easy,” Jacob said, his breath damp and rank in his nostrils. The soldier with the gun on Bella laughed.

Jacob forgot about the gun on him; he moved fast enough that it didn’t matter. He leapt, and somehow opened the belly of the man with the gun to Bella’s head. He briefly gnawed the liver, to show dominance and because frankly it had been a long time since his last meal. “Oh god,” the man said.

The second soldier moved his gun hand. He was shaking. He swept it through air like jelly to point at Jacob. To Jacob everything was in slow motion. He took a last bite of liver and intercepted the gun hand before it pointed fully at the horse. He knocked the man over and ripped up his wrist so he dropped the gun.

Something clicked against Jacob’s skull. “Easy,” said the third soldier, pale but steady. The gun barrel was silver; a strange choice but in this case it did the trick. Jacob froze.

### Unexpected gift, unexpected time

Egg and Jacob had been moved to a prison tent. They were securely tied up, and Jacob had been fitted with a velcro lampshade so he couldn’t gnaw apart the ropes. “Let’s talk about what happened back there,” said their captor.

“Your men drew their weapons first.”

“You trespassed.” Their captor was highly ranked in the Quaker witch-hunting apparatus. He had introduced himself as Eamon de Valera and was only a lieutenant but the kids were suspecting that lieutenant was the highest grade of witchfinder still in service.

“This isn’t your land. We’re not soldiers,” Egg said.

Valera took something from the kids’ piled luggage and personal items. “You’re armed, though. Who gave you this?”

It was Jacob’s bow. “I made it myself.” The plastic collar made his voice echo weirdly in his sensitive ears.

“What about this?” Valera traced a symbol along the side. “The lightning bolt. Smacks of,” and he adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses for dramatic effect, “witchcraft.”

“The tree I made it from was split by lightning.”

“Why are you moving now?” Egg asked. “Aren’t you supposed to be pacifists?”

“Men have been led in dark paths, through the providence and dispensation of God.” Valera took a rolled paper from his plain vest and let it open. “Battle orders,” he said. There was a seal at the bottom, a four-pointed star overlaid on a larger one. “The star worshippers are finally taking action against the followers of the great serpent.”

“We were just passing through,” Jacob objected. “We weren’t expecting –”

The entrace flap opened with a snap. A plainly-dressed private entered and held a salute. “The grand inquisitor,” he announced in parade voice. Valera winced and Jacob grimaced. “The hammer of heretics,” the crier continued, “the light of Spain.”

A garishly dressed person entered. “Fray Alonso,” the crier said at last, and bowed, his introduction complete. Fray Alonso was in head-to-toe blood-red robes and a red galero hat. His reluctance to engage in plain dress made everyone in the tent uncomfortable, even Egg and Jacob who didn’t know the rules here yet.

“A pair of witches, eh?” He adjusted the hat. It was borrowed; he hadn’t expected an interrogation on the road. “Have they been sworn in, General?”

“Lieutenant,” Valera said.

“No, I am the _Grand_ Inquisitor.” Fray Alonso held up his sigil of office. “Will you tell me the truth?”

Egg shrugged. “Yes.” She and Jacob launched into the strongest oath they knew: “In hope of deliverance from the darkness that surrounds us.” “We swear,” Jacob finished.

“No, no, no.” Fray Alonso shook his head elaborately. “Let your word be Yes, Yes, or No, No; anything more than this comes from the evil one.”

“The jewel in the lotus,” Egg whispered.

“What?” Fray Alonso held his hand to his ear. “I couldn’t hear you.”

“Perhaps some water,” Jacob said. “Our throats are parched from the hard ride and the night outside.”

“You,” Alonso commanded the private, still kneeling, who had announced him. “Dale Earnhardt. You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately.” Valera’s eyes widened at his tone. The poor private’s grip tightened on his belt but he kept his wits. “Fetch him some water.”

The young private returned a moment later with a canteen, but when he tried to tip it into Jacob’s mouth, the E-collar got in the way.

“Fool!” Fray Alonso spat. “Let me!” He stepped forward and began to undo the velcro of the collar.

“Sir,” the private said, “is that wise?”

“I’ll say what’s wise!” Fray Alonso struck him across the mouth. It wasn’t a hard blow but the private fell over from shock. Valera, who had been watching silently, pointed at the tent flap and the private gratefully left.

When the collar was off, Fray Alonso tipped the canteen into Jacob’s mouth, who drank gratefully.

“Thank you,” Jacob said. Hands still tied, he flexed his leg muscles, then sprang. The impact knocked Alonso down. He was out of commission from just whiplash, but Jacob pinned him with a knee to the belly, just in case. He tore out the windpipe and associated blood vessels, then rose.

Valera went to draw his knife. Egg’s eyes opened – her pupils glowed like coals. His hand froze.

“Most miracles now-a-days prove but illusions,” Valera said. “And ye may see by this how wary judges should be in trusting accusations.” Nobody moved. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re free to go.” Egg blinked and her eyes were back to normal.

They picked up Bella on their way out, who was fine and had gotten a meal for her troubles.

### The fifth cup

“Would you really have burned that guy?” Jacob asked.

“You’re one to talk,” Egg said. “If this trip goes on you’re going to need a bib.”

Jacob’s shirt was stained with gore. “Fair enough.”

They had taken a bunch of supplies from the Quakers, but exhausted most of them earlier in the evening, including all of their matches; Jacob typically slept outside without a fire and Egg’s attempt to ignite a fire with maser plasma had blasted a hole in the ground and scattered their wood. They went the old-fashioned way: lighter-fluid and rolled-up newspaper, but they only brought one newspaper and were trying to conserve it for toilet use.

“We need help finding our friends,” Egg mused, not asking Jacob because he was unlikely to be much help with the planning. She rummaged. “Not much to work with; this is our last bottle of wine.”

“Help,” Jacob said. “Wine.” Something was tickling his memory. “There’s _one person_ we can ask for help, if we’re willing to waste it.”

“You don’t mean –”.

Jacob nodded.

They filled a cup and said his name. “Nothing’s happening,” Egg said. “Just wait.” “Have you done this before?” “I’ve never needed to.”

Some time passed. “I think it’s draining.”

When the cup was empty, they did it again. After a third cup boiled off, a figure appeared in the trees at the edge of their firelight.

“Be careful,” Jacob said. “It may not be him.”

One buck-skinned boot stepped into the circle of light.

“Of course it’s him,” Egg said. “Who else could it be?”

They stayed perfectly still in case it was a dream. He stepped fully into the light and blessed them, one by one, with a touch to the forehead. “Walk with Elyas, my daughter. Walk with Elyas, my son.”

Jacob still didn’t believe. “Is it really –”

“Yes kids,” he said. It was a Rip van Winkle looking man, dressed in things you can kill in the woods, his tools and weapons made from stones and leftover parts of the buffalo. “I’ve come to help you.” No razor had touched his face for quite some time. “It’s me, the prophet Elijah.”

He promised to do more for them later but for a start he took them to a better campsite, a stone outcrop forming a cave on a hillside where they could be sheltered from wind, rain, and search parties of vengeful Quakers.

They built a small fire. Elijah, delighted by their steel weapons, struck sparks with his flint tools to kindle it. With the light it became clear that the cave was not natural, but part of an ancient colossal statue, carved in careful proportions if now weathered.

“Who was it, Elijah?” Egg begged.

But he didn’t know. “Records are pointless,” he said. “There is a strange conceit in making them when we are the last.”

This didn’t sit well with Jacob. “Why did they build it then?”

“A race should leave something. The world is going … and the end of the world comes, not for us, perhaps, but soon. And we have always loved monuments.”

### Hippie wagons and the full moon

They were woken by the jingling of wagons laden with random doodads and junk. A group of traveling hippies was setting up camp on the hill below them, still getting set up but already tuning up instruments and selling flowers.

“See,” Elijah said. “Things are looking up already.”

“Hippies, though,” Egg said.

“Don’t scoff,” Elijah said. “They’ll serve to keep the Quakers away for now. Anyone in plain dress would stand out here like a sore thumb.” And indeed he was right – the troupe’s style was bright and garish.

Egg found the leader. “Hold sir. Where are you going?”

“Home,” he said.

“And where from,” Elijah asked.

“Home, sir. We are travelling people. We take our chances where we can find them.”

“And where is home,” Jacob asked.

“I’m not sure.” The wind came up and made the hippie leader look sad and wise for a second, like he had lost something important. “We grow rusty and you catch us at the very point of decadence. By this time tomorrow we might have forgotten everything we ever knew.”

Nonetheless the hippies were warm hosts; generous to share what they had and thirsty for information about the country here. They weren’t much bothered by the threat of marauding Quakers. “They won’t bother us. I think we frighten them. We remind them of what they left behind.”

Jacob wanted to make some planks from a nearby tree to repair one of the wagons. Among his booty from the Quakers’ camp was a sweet circular saw. But the hippies, while grateful, turned him down.

“You will think me foolish,” the leader said, “but every tearing off of a leaf would be a wound in my heart.”

Instead of wagon repair they danced that night. And in particular, they did a belly dance to shock the visitors. Jacob only had eyes for Bella but encouraged Egg Ween to participate to get her out of her head.

“Are you going to dance the samsara now?” he asked.

“No,” Egg said. “Or yes. In a way we’re all dancing the samsara.”

“So yes then?” He was immune to subtlety.

“No,” she sighed.

They soon grew sleepy. Elijah came to Jacob as he was drifting off with a bunch of rope. “Full moon tonight, boy,” he said. “Best tie you up for your own protection.”

* * *

Jacob dreamed that night. A woman with raven hair, not feathers but actual hair, but black like raven feathers, appeared to him. She was beautiful, the dream seemed to announce, but as he thought about it she was nothing like Bella, his paradigm of female beauty. For one thing she had too few legs.

She saw him arrive and cleared her throat. “Hail the day that sees him rise,” she said, with the demeanor of throwing a plastic lei around his neck, but standing still. Jacob didn’t respond. In the background a man was on fire, or his face was on fire, or something. Jacob normally didn’t have dreams like this and blamed the hippies’ fruitatarian supper.

The burning man had a knife, or his hands were knives, or something, and he was laughing in a way that made Jacob uncomfortable.

All around were wolves, but the woman seemed not to see them. She handed him a deck of cards. Jacob cut the deck to the queen of spades but the cards were all the same. The wolves laughed or snarled.

She looked at his card. “It’s you, isn’t it, I know it’s you.”

Jacob didn’t respond. “Three-two-one-wake,” he said, on a lark. It didn’t work. He clapped his hands.

The prophet Elijah was there too, or had just arrived, even though there was no wine. “I don’t have any wine for you,” Jacob told him. “I’m sorry.”

“Shhh,” Elijah said. “You’re just a boy. You need to think about good thoughts while you’re still a boy.”

The dark-haired woman laughed – not a cackle but also not _not_ a cackle. Her delivery was off. “Now or tomorrow, he is mine.”

“Begone,” Elijah said.

“I’m trying,” Jacob said.

“Order me not,” said the woman. “I, who built and then broke the Chandrayana. I –”

“All that’s in the past.” Everything here was lit by fire, and they were in some sort of cave, but Elijah seemed to carry a circle of healthy light with him. “Do I have to list your names? I remember them from the last time we did this.”

“Fine,” she said. “I’m going. I don’t want this one anyway. He’s the wrong one.”

Elijah shook his head. “You’ve got to change your evil ways.”

Jacob left the dream; he moved on to other visions. His mind wandered. He thought of the wolves, the ones he had named – he had known their faces, he had known their ways.

When he awoke the dire wolf, six hundred pounts of sin, was sniffing at the window of his carriage. He gasped, and then met its eyes. It stared back and grinned in the way canine faces can grin. “Please don’t murder me,” he said.

### The road to Camelon

They prepared to take their leave of the hippies.

“If you’re headed home, but you don’t know where home is,” Egg asked, “how do you decide which road to take?”

“We can move,” the hippie told her, “change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current.”

The hippie matriarch raised a mark of office. She was a tie-dye version of the late Fray Ansolo. She began a formula of farewell. “This year we live in an imperfect world, but we patiently await a time in which we live in spiritual perfection.”

Elijah finished it: “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end.”

As if the formula had exhausted something in him, Elijah faded, his edges smearing away as wine-vapor in the merciful wind.

“Goodbye,” Jacob said. “Thank you for getting rid of that dream-lady.”

“Wait,” Egg said. “Which road do we take?”

The last they saw of him, he was pointing to the highway onramp. Then he was nothing but a purple cloud, a wine-stain blending with the fog. The sign said ‘Camelon – 20 miles’. Egg and Jacob made their way and hoped for a quiet journey.


	4. Thumbing a ride with the devil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's this guy, he's after us in our dreams. The kids learn that hitching rides is dangerous and that even a uniformed authority figure can hide a dark secret.

### Hitching to Camelon

Lemmy held his thumb up by the dusty road, whistling a tune he never heard. He and Tommy and Randall had stuck together on the flight from Mashhad and were now bumming rides because it beat walking. Their horses they had set free out of pity, to graze and be wild.

It was hot. The sun dipped behind a cloud for a moment as Lemmy touched the pewter blade stuck in his belt, the nondescript knife he’d picked up in the cursed treasure room around the time he became radioactive. His joints ached.

Finally, a trucker slowed to pick them up. They gratefully piled in to the air-conditioned cab. “Hold up, hold up,” the driver said. “Can only fit the young boys. You’ll ride in the back, old timer.”

“Thanks for stopping,” Lemmy said. “It’s been mostly refugees down this road and they’re not too comfortable with strangers.”

“Mmm-hmm,” the driver said. He wasn’t what they were expecting – waxed black mustache and pale arms, his look more goth than trucker.

“What’s that you’ve got on the radio?” Randall tried.

“NPR,” the driver said. The boys took the hint and they rode in silence for a while. Finally the driver broke the ice. “You boys headed to Arien?”

“Yup,” Randall said.

“Not much to do in Arien,” the driver said.

Lemmy nodded. “We know.”

“Usual reason, then?” the driver said.

Lemmy, who was sitting in the middle, was starting to get uncomfortable, but Randall prodded him to agree. “Yup.”

A tear leaked from the driver’s eye, streaking his eyeshadow.

“What’s wrong?” Randall asked. “Are you okay to drive?”

“Nothing,” the man said. “Nothing – it’s just – so darn good to have new blood in the fold.”

The boys nodded. “You can say that again,” Randall said.

“So it’s your first black mass then?”

* * *

Tommy surveyed the carnage in the truck cab. “You boys couldn’t think of a better way out of this situation?”

“I was just holding the knife on him until he pulled over,” Lemmy protested.

“And he struggled?”

“Not exactly,” Lemmy said. “He hit a bump.” Tommy winced. “But I just scratched him, I swear.” Tommy shook his head.

“He was a crypto-satanist,” Randall said in their defense. “Apparently the next town on the road is crawling with them.”

“Don’t suppose either of you boys has a CDL,” Tommy said, his mustache frowning.

### Lemmy’s croak dream

The dream is always the same. Lemmy shook in his sleep like the exorcist, making the bunk creak. His eyes fluttered in REM and his face creased like he was trying to shut them, to unsee something.

Instead of going home, he went to the neighbors. He rang but but nobody answered; the door was open so he went inside.

He heard the water running and went upstairs. There was a woman in the shower, skin silver-bright like the moon, her veins black underneath like old blood left to dry, like ink.

But it’s a dream so he goes with it. Lemmy fought through the fog to find her and is standing in a clear circle. The woman showed him her back and hurried into a towel with fringe of silver threads.

“Do you want me to go?”

She turned. Her dark hair burned his eyes. “Hail the day that sees him rise.”

By her side was a man with – not a burning face but a burnt face, and a worn-out christmas sweater. His hands were behind his back. He had on – not a top-hat, but something like it, maybe a fedora.

“Where is this?” Lemmy asked.

The sidekick lifted his sweater as the woman stood back. He – wasn’t holding a knife, but there was a knife. “Watch this!” He cut one side of his own chest from the nipple downward. Green goop and maggots writhed in the gash. He giggled and ground his teeth through taut lips, nervously, like he hadn’t thought this through.

The scene changed. Lemmy was dicing with the burned man at a long table. The woman in silver and white was still there, reciting a long list of names.

“Who are those names?” Lemmy asked. He won the first roll. The burned man slashed at him with the not-a-knife, but was far away and couldn’t reach.

“He was already enslaved to me,” the woman said, “and knew it not. The very Law he served preserved me through that cataclysm, though all but a few of his own people and works were stricken into death.”

Lemmy lost the second roll. The table was suddenly shorter. The burned man struck again, still too far to reach, but closer. Lemmy couldn’t stand or lean back; all he could do to live was win.

The woman read more names. “Taisha Abelar. Yarlan Zey.”

Lemmy lost another roll. The table didn’t shrink, it changed so that it had always been shorter. “Were it to have existed other than as a fragmented agonised hallucination –” Lemmy said. “But it’s a dream.”

“More than a dream,” the woman said, interrupting her litany of names, “in this region of vagueness in which all reality dissolves.”

The table was shorter still. The blades – there were four of them – were no longer an abstraction. They still couldn’t reach him, but they clicked in his ears.

“Think,” he said. “Think.” He rolled again and won. “Why doesn’t the table recover when I win?” The silver woman smiled and the burned man grimaced, giggling. “Think.” Lemmy lost again, and this time he felt the wind of the blades on his face.

“Think. Think.” He won, and won, and kept winning. The burned man was giggling continuously now. “Why is he laughing?”

“The game is rigged,” the woman said. “You have to win every toss. He only has to win once.”

“Think Lemmy, think. Why can’t I move?”

“You can’t think forever. In this place all probabilities decay to our win.”

“All thought expresses a roll of the dice,” he said, and lost the roll. The four knives could reach him now. He leaned back and they just cut his shirt.

* * *

Lemmy stared at the dark wall for a long time after waking. It was only midnight but he didn’t want to dream again. Rummaging through the hostel’s medicine cabinet for Sta-awake pills (fast acting), he ran into Randall taking a leak.

“What’s up?”

“Bad dream,” Lemmy said, his hand shaking as he poured out two pills.

“You gotta cut your fingernails,” Randall said. Lemmy looked down and saw that his shirt was cut where the burned man cut him in the dream. There was blood underneath. “Or you gotta stop that kind of dreaming. One or the other.”

“She was listing names,” Lemmy said. “When I woke up it was like he was still in the room with me.”

“Names?” Randall said. “That’s amazing you saying that. That made me remember the dream _I_ had last night.”

“The false prophet Rogaine,” they said at the same time.

Lemmy’s eyes widened. “It _was_ the same dream.”

### The bad hostel

The next day they hitched all the way to Chaturaji, where they found a hostel that would put them up for a song.

While Tommy negotiated, the boys wandered outside. There were cops milling around the entrance. Paramedics rushed past with a wicker gurney.

“You don’t need a stretcher up there,” said the cop guarding the stairs. “You need a mop.”

“Trouble, kommandant?” Randall asked him.

The commander, a highway patrolman with the kind of sunglasses that flip up and down, kept them down so that Randall couldn’t win the staring contest. “No trouble,” he said, his body language adding ‘none of your business’.

Tommy came out to get them. “Any trouble, boys?”

Randall took a last look at the cop. “No trouble,” he muttered.

Later, as Tommy was wrapping up his set, the cop found them in the dining room. Below his badge a tag gave his name as GOETH in capitals. It was indoors, and nighttime, but he still had the shades down; they couldn’t see his eyes.

He sat with Randall and Lemmy uninvited. “Hal Goeth,” he said by way of introduction. When they ignored him, he did a “And you are?” and laughed when they ignored him still.

“It doesn’t matter, you realize. He told me your names when he sent me.” He flipped up his shades. His eyes put the lie to his confident voice; they were strained and frightened. It looked like he hadn’t slept. “When you sell your soul he tells you things _all the time_.”

Tommy joined them at the table. Outnumbered, Goeth left. Tommy overheard the last piece which was, frankly, enough to get the gist. “Pack it up,” he told the boys. “It’s still light, we can hitch to the next town.”

They had the bright idea of leaving through the garage so they wouldn’t be followed but the commander had his people posted at all the exits. Someone radioed him. He was waiting for them at the ramp.

“Get to the road,” Randall said. “I can take him.” He clutched his sheathed sword til his palm cramped. The ornate hilt bit into his hand.

The three of them moved at the same time, but spread apart, so Goeth had to choose one to intercept. Randall, armed, seemed the most dangerous to turn his back on. Commander Goeth and Randall faced off as Lemmy and Tommy vanished up the ramp.

Goeth twirled his nightstick in his hand and then struck. Randall dodged back and wrestled the sword out of its scabbard. “You haven’t done this before, have you?” Goeth said.

Goeth struck again and Randall parried; even though it was sword against nightstick and the greater range was his, he felt outmatched. “The jewel in the lotus,” he whispered.

“What was that?” Goeth taunted. “Speak up.” Goeth struck again but with pituitary crack amping up his depth perception and reflexes, Randall parried cleanly. Goeth’s confident smile slipped a little bit but he was a seasoned fighter; he hadn’t shown an opening yet and didn’t plan to.

Randall had listened closely to Egg’s lessons. “The jewel in the lotus,” he said, louder. Goeth’s confidence declined further, although he didn’t show it – crazy talk impressed all the crypto-satanists.

As Randall deepened his trance, his flesh was itching on the bone. He could feel it yearning to grow into new and extravagant shapes. In the distance, lightning struck.

The cop’s smile came back. “Poor weather to be hitching. Why not stay at the hostel. We’ll talk, you don’t have to sign anything yet.”

Randall couldn’t hear him. From the texture of the wind he knew where next the lightning would fall. Suns baked him. The void froze him. Infinity drew him on like a promise. Sad stony planets spun beneath him, their cisterns barren.

Lemmy’s arrow took Hal Goeth in the leg. “We got a ride. Coming?”

* * *

They rattled along in the back of a pickup truck. The road was just as dusty and the sun was low, red and blinding where the road vanished in the west.

Randall adjusted his collar for the tenth time. “Did it get warmer?”

“Did that crypto-satanist give you something?” Lemmy asked. “You’re acting kind of itchy.”

“Mind your surroundings,” Tommy said, nodding at the other man sharing the truck bed.

“He’s harmless,” Lemmy said. “He’s sleeping.” The man had seemed to perk up, though, when Lemmy mentioned crypto-satanists. He was dressed in dark colors, hard to distinguish in the slanted light, and had a big dark hat that covered his eyes.

Tommy crabwalked over on the jouncing bed. He felt Randall’s forehead. “Feels like fever, to be honest.” The stranger in the dark hat seemed, again, to be listening, though he gave no outward sign.

“I’m not tired,” Randall said. “I feel kind of amped.”

Tommy sat back down with his own bags. “With any luck we can show you to a doctor at our next stop.”

“I wish I knew why they were chasing us, though,” Lemmy said. “I’m tired of watching my back.” He touched the knife he had gotten in Mashhad, the bare pewter blade at his hip, as he had taken to doing sometimes. A cloud on the horizon played its shadow over him.

The stranger shifted and licked his lips. His accent, when he spoke, was surprisingly normal. He still didn’t lift his head; his hat hid his face from the blinding sunset. “If the question is pursuit by satanists,” he said, his voice soft and gentle, “I might be able to shed some light.” Or not ‘gentle’ – ‘hypnotic’ described it better.

“By all means,” Tommy said. “Enlighten us.”

“A man needs to wet his whistle if he’s going to be talking at any length,” the stranger said. Lemmy threw him the waterskin. His hand snaked out and caught it but after holding it for a second, he tossed it back. He never raised his head. “Water? What good will that do me?”

Tommy handed over a small flask. The man turned away from them and tilted back his head, drinking deeply of it. “Ahhhhh.” He gave it back. “A bargain is a bargain,” he said. “Crypto-satanists are the least of the Baron’s servants, you know.”

Randall was trying to scratch his back. Lemmy was paying close attention to the stranger. Tommy had his hands in his trenchcoat as if he were cold. The stranger nodded.

“The Baron hunts for three reasons. First is those he wishes to destroy – but if that were the goal, the method would be poison. You would be dead before you knew you were being hunted.” He cleared his throat. Tommy freed one hand and gave him another shot at the flask. “Ahhhh.”

“The second reason is those he wishes to bring into the fold, who have expressed doubts about their faith or its central dogma, who have been identified as targets for recruitment, who can be tempted.”

“And the third?” Lemmy asked. “We’re not either of those groups.”

“Those whom he has identified to be turned.”

“Isn’t that the same as the second group?”

“I didn’t say tempted,” the man in the hat said. “I said turned. Temptation leaves room for the person’s will.”

They rode in silence. The sun finished setting and they rode on in early dusk. Eventually Lemmy realized: “You never said how you know what you know. How do we know you’re telling the truth?”

“You don’t,” the stranger said. Wrapping himself in shadows, he rose to his feet on the vibrating truck bed; he was very tall, and scarecrow thin. The wind carried away his broad black hat, showing his face. “But you can be sure that I am an authority on the subject.” In the place of eyes, there were pale spots of translucent skin showing the blue blood beneath, like a cavefish.

“A mire-troll!” Lemmy cried. Tommy was up in a flash, and his hands whipped out of his coat, a knife in each.

The mire-troll’s poison blade, brittle and pitted with neutron damage, more air than metal, slid from its sheath and swept down. Tommy stopped its stroke with both of his blades together, striking the usual radioactive sparks.

“Jump,” he told the boys. “Quickly.” He thrust with one knife and the black blade was there to meet him. The boys hesitated, weighing the discomfort of jumping from a moving truck against the odds of being skewered on the mire-troll’s unsanitary sword.

Tommy kicked it in the shin to slow it down and stopped another stroke, grunting from the weight of the blow. “No hose here,” the mire-troll said. “No floodlamps either.”

“I see,” Tommy said, straining. “That my reputation. Precedes me.” The black sword groaned and creaked. The friction of edge on edge squealed like scissors on a metal fence. “Fly, you fools!”

They didn’t need to be told a third time. The boys jumped, rolling as they landed and getting to the shoulder. The truck rounded a bend and was gone. Flashes of white and green lit the sky above the road.

“Anything broken?” Randall asked. Lemmy checked himself and shook his head. The whine of brakes and slide of tires sounded from down the road. The boys shared a glance and jogged after it.

They found the pickup a half-mile down. Tommy was sitting on the open tailgate, picking his teeth. The mire-troll’s sword was broken; the tip half was stuck through the mire-troll’s chest. The hilt half was stuck in the ground by the roadside.

Tommy’s hair, a mousy gray before, had been bleached by the radiation to pure lustrous white, glowing through the floating dust. He stroked and flipped it.

“What took you?” he said. “Help me dump this body and we can be on our merry way.”

* * *

They found a better town and a better hotel that was also, like the first place, willing to trade food and lodging for a song. If anything, the white hair made it easier for Tommy to sell his work.

He sat at the singer-songwriter stool and tuned up but then saw something on the coffee table. “There, that,” he pointed. “Bring it up here.”

He flipped through the book. “I know this one.” He read from it aloud.

It was ancien regime french, same as everything around here. The french, however, had a totally different consistency from any utterance they had heard on this journey: slow, thoughtful, clear and musical, stripped of its harshness and over-emphasis and gush; and in those minutes, as the lamplight caught the reader’s white hair and eyebrows and sweeping white moustache and twinkled in the signet ring of the hand that held the volume, the boys understood for the first time how magnificent a language it could be.

### Randall’s dream

A maze. Randall thought he might be dreaming, but better to take it seriously just in case. The passages wound on and on, twisting, turning, leading nowhere. Had he lost his way? No, don’t even think that. Keep going keep going keep going …

A scream, a child’s cry. But no. There was a sheep randomly in a dark, wet hallway, bleating to startle him. He found the exit, a shadowy room at the smoky candle end of time.

“Hail the day that sees him rise?” The speaker was a woman with silver skin and hair the color of fresh asphalt; you could almost see your reflection in it. She had lashes like to rays of darkness, and a brow of pearl.

“What makes you think it’s me?” Randall asked.

“I know it’s one of the three,” the woman said. “Process of elimination. Pigeon-hole principle. It’s practically a proof.”

“It proves your argument but only if your assumptions hold.” Randall noticed weight and motion at the edge of light. “Is there someone behind you? My eyes can’t –”

A blur stepped into the area in which the dream had focus. It was a burned man in a christmas sweater, brown fedora held respectfully under his arm as if he were calling on his in-laws.

On stage three morlocks played, one of them setting a candomble rhythm on congas, the second rattling the shekere, and the last at the mic grunting and crying to the beat.

“Do you remember me?” the burned man asked. “This isn’t the first time we’ve met like this.”

The burned man was like some living flaw in time, through which leaked faint poisonous memories of the Afternoon – its fantastic conspiracies and motiveless sciences, all its frigid cruelties and raging glory.

“My oldest memories are holes,” Randall said.

“What’s the first thing after all the things you’ve forgotten?” the silver woman asked.

Randall could feel the old-man wisdom, the accumulation out of the experiences from countless possible lives. Something seemed to chuckle and rub its hands within him.

“You can’t be who I think you are,” Randall said.

“Why not?” the burned man asked.

Randall summoned the formula to protect him. “Baron Saturday is bound in Sheol, in adamant bonds infrangible.”

“Bound?” the burned man said. “I was around when Jesus had his moment of doubt. I made sure Pilate washed his hands afterwards.” He seemed more perplexed than offended. “I have never been bound.”

“I don’t believe you.” Randall said. “I know how to survive a dream. Madness is the only danger.”

“Not the only,” the silver woman said, “and not the smallest.”

“I have begun my attack upon this age,” the burned man said. “The future is mine. I will not fail again.”

“The Ageless Senseis will oppose you,” Randall said. He was hoarse, parched by the oven-dry air.

The silver woman smiled. “They have not mastered the seventh part of our Lore, and yet in their pride they dare to name themselves servants of Peace.” Her fingers twitched, and in her proffered palm soft light traced the parabolas of a Rutherford atom. “They are too blind to perceive their own arrogance.”

“I know the secret now,” Randall whispered. “This is just a dream.”

“Let them grope through their shallow mysteries for a time,” the burned man said to his silver friend, ignoring Randall now. “Barely fearing that I am alive.”

“You’re not alive,” Randall said. “This whole thing is just a dream.”

“The Power which upholds me has stood since the creation of Time.”

Randall turned his back on them and found the door out of the room. “I take back every bit of energy I gave you.” He heard knives sliding against each other, cutting the air at his back. His skin crawled but he didn’t turn around. “You’re nothing,” he said. As his hand touched the handle of the door, “You’re shit.”

He dissolved as knives split the space where he had been.

“I told you,” the woman said when Randall had faded fully and probably couldn’t hear them. Other figures stepped to the edge of the light; perhaps they had been watching all along, perhaps they were summoned after. “How say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?”

“He was seen of me also,” the burned man said, “as of one born out of due time.”

* * *

Randall woke up clutching his chest. Lemmy was already awake, hyperventilating in the top bunk.

“I could be bounded in a nut shell,” Randall said, “and count myself a king of infinite space.” He went through Lemmy’s bags for the Sta-awake. “Were it not that I have bad dreams.”

### Nimue exposition scene

Nimue knelt in the shoulder, rooting around in the dust for something that her sharp senses had spotted as they rode past. Once she dug it out, she got down on her hands and knees to smell it, not wanting to touch it too much lest her own musk overwhelm the trail.

“Yup,” she said. “That’s Marathon tobacker all right.”

“What did she find?” Morainn asked. She seldom spoke to Nimue directly and they had taken to using Lance as an intermediary.

“It’s a cigarette,” Lance said.

“Isn’t that their main export? If you factor in the law of don’t smoke what you sell, it’s better evidence of their absence than their presence.”

Nimue growled. It was a valid objection. “Aha,” she said, holding it up to the light. “A gray mustache hair.”

“Hot damn!” Morainn said, punching her palm. “They came this way. But how are they staying ahead of us?”

“Hitching, probably,” Lance said. “We’re on horses and this highway is mostly motorized traffic.”

The three of them remounted and started up. They had planned to meet the others in Camelon anyway, so this tracking didn’t do much good, but it bled off some of Nimue’s nervous energy and made her feel useful.

“Why is Baron Saturday hunting those boys, anyway?” Nimue asked.

“Why, he wants what he has always wanted,” Morainn said, adopting a lecturing tone. “A return to the dark times at the last millennium, when the animate and the inanimate, the living and the dead, grew closer together in nature. Good and evil began to collapse in on each other. Even some men chose to serve the spreading darkness.”

“But what do those young boys have to do with it? Isn’t Baron Saturday doing twenty-five years to life? And won’t the star god defend us?”

“Twenty-five to life isn’t forever,” Morainn said, “and it’s been a long time since he went in.” She was so engrossed in her explanation that she didn’t notice Lance light up the discarded butt and take a drag. “And I don’t worship the star god. We Ageless Senseis are followers of the great serpent. We believe the star god can’t or won’t take a hand personally.”

“Where do the young boys fit in?”

“When the star god wants something done, it manifests itself in one of the old blood, of the old powers. Creation, preservation, destruction …” Morainn ticked them off on her fingers. “Things tend to happen around them. When all three aspects of the god are present at once, each one concentrated in one of three known collectively as the Tyr-ridan, the final battle is supposed to occur.”

“The final battle –” Nimue covered her mouth. “Is it so late already? What if they fail?”

“Instead of the world’s salvation, endless sorrow.” Morainn shivered and lifted her nose to the wind like an animal sensing a threat. "It’s the whole myth frozen in the wrong place, with everything distorted to make its lowest point look like its proper end.

She turned on Lance. “Are you smoking again?” Morainn put her index fingers on her temples and sent him a powerful mental pulse.

Lance ground his teeth and did the Donnie Darko smile. His joints creaked against his muscles as he put out the cigarette on his hand and threw it back where he found it. Morainn shook her head. “All that work we did and you make me stoop to this.”

“I hate when you treat him that way,” Nimue said.

“Do you _want_ him smoking those things?” Morainn said. “Anyway, don’t blame me. These were capable, self-reliant men and women until their god altered their basic natures. Now they must either serve a Sensei or suffer great emotional distress.”

“Damn their god anyway for having made him so dependent,” Nimue said. “And double damn you Senseis for taking such ruthless advantage of the fact.”

Lance shook out his hand. That cigarette burn really stung. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s conserve our strength. Camelon won’t ride itself.” They stared at him. “To us, I mean.”


	5. Galahad -- enough of his life to explain his reputation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The man-hating Lida tries to cut off everyone's hands for stealing. Randall has to justify carrying his father's sword (oh the humanity). We learn about being spayed and gelded, it's more humane for your pets. Lemmy is just resting his eyes. Genetic testing with no privacy policy (gasp).

### Finally a good hotel

Riding into Camelon, city at the beginning and end of every story, the celtic jerusalem to be built up and torn down forty times over, there were signs, even then, to be read by those with eyes, that foretold something, if but a tithe of the inconceivable future.

Not only the havoc caused by the great frosts of the winter and spring, not only walnut trees blackened and withered, vines stricken, rye killed. Not only starved cattle, and women bent double, gathering weeds.

But other things more ominous; a strange herding of men at cross-roads and bridges, where they waited for they knew not what; a something lowering in these men’s silence, a something expectant in their faces; worst of all, a something dangerous in their scowling eyes and sunken cheeks. Hunger had pinched them; the elections had roused them.

The hostels that had served Tommy and the boys so well on the road were packed with refugees. Tommy guided them through thronged streets and sidewalks. “Easy, Lemmy,” he said – Lemmy’s hand was constantly at his knife and from his eyes he seemed like to use it.

Mounting the bridge from the low-rent to the high-rent district, a red bird came up from its nest in the piles; it was the first spot of color they’d seen since passing the city gate. It darted past them and it was like it restored light and color to the world. The streets were clean. The moaning from the alleys was replaced by healthy hammering of kitchen-remodeling and the jingle of coins being weighed. Every other storefront sold nice clothes or colorful candies and cakes.

The Queen’s Shilling was the name of the place. “Holy crap, Tommy,” Randall said. “How can we afford this?” The hotel was huge, set back from the street with some kind of circular driveway. Tommy shrugged, grinned, leading them into the lobby (equally plush).

“Relax, boys. This is _my_ city. Your money’s no good here.”

“We know,” Lemmy said, feeling his pockets. He reached out thirstily to a follow-the-lady scam on the street but Randall pulled him onward.

Tommy flipped coins and two-fingered salutes to the entrance staff, who marked him at thirty paces as a big spender and pretended to recognize him.

“Gil here?” Tommy asked at the desk.

The desk clerk sized him up. “He comes in late on weekdays. Who’s asking?”

“Just send him down. I’m an old friend.”

The clerk, who was familiar with hotel guests that came in pretending to know somebody, frankly hated this part of the job. He dialed a phone and rotated it away from his mouth to ask Tommy, “Your name?” Tommy gave it, grinning as if he expected the clerk to recognize him.

The boys were standing with the luggage and broadcasting their best ‘we’re not with him’ vibe.

“Yes,” the clerk said. “Yes. Yes.” He waited, listening to a question, and looked Tommy up and down. “I doubt it.” The Charlie Brown voice on the other end of the phone got louder. “Yes.” He hung up the phone. “Wait here,” the clerk said, without saying what they were waiting for.

To everyone’s surprise Mr Gil did indeed come down. He recognized Tommy from the elevator and wobbled over to greet him. “Heyyyy man!” They did some kind of secret handshake. “Staying out of trouble?”

“You know it,” Tommy said with a grin.

“Love the hair. It works for you.”

Tommy made a wide gesture that encompassed the boys. “Can you believe these guys?” he said, as if they were his grandkids.

Gil shook his head as if he couldn’t. “You hungry? I got a bottle of something you’ll like.” They played at punching each other in the gut. “Put your dukes up, eh?”

“I don’t have any dukes!” Tommy protested. They wandered off cackling and patting each other on the back.

* * *

Lemmy was up in the room, stroking the shiv at his belt and brooding most heinously. Randall couldn’t stand it and went exploring.

He found a sort of library. There was a copy of John Mandeville on the table, a familiar old friend. Hundreds of other books lined the wall. The fact of cyclic history made it difficult to distinguish fiction from non- but Randall scanned the row headers and found some titles on his summer reading list.

Eventually he made his way to the law section and someone cleared their throat behind him.

Randall turned. “Umm,” he said.

Randall was pretty tall but this guy was _really_ tall. At first Randall thought he was a bull-moose morlock but he had neither horns nor antlers so it didn’t quite fit.

“Um,” Randall said.

The whatever-it-was had a head on Randall height-wise and large, distorted facial features, like a muppet – giant nose, huge ears ancient victims to gravity, long tufted sideburns curling down from them. “Lawyer,” he said, holding out a hand.

“You have the right to an attorney,” Randall said. “If you cannot afford one, one will be …” He trailed off.

The giant listened patiently and shook his head. “Lawyer,” he said, “van Arent van Halen.”

Randall clasped the hand. It was like high fiving a bag of kielbasas. “Randall Thorpe,” he said. It was a long handshake; neither of them knew what to say next.

“So you’re just, you know, sightseeing?” Randall asked, still not sure who or what he was dealing with.

Lawyer had been whittling something out of a pale wood with no visible grain. He quickly finished it now. The chips that fell to the ground landed hard like ceramic. “I made this for you,” he said shyly, handing it over. Randall took it, surprised at its weight, and doubly surprised that it was made of hard stone.

It depicted something that could be an alligator or a snake. Its heart was pierced with something that could be a stylized sunbeam or lightning bolt.

“The leviathan,” Lawyer said apologetically. “The great serpent.” The giant went back to counting the M&Ms in the dish and picking out the brown ones, sighing like a hydraulic press and sneaking a few when nobody was looking.

### The Red Cockade

There was some kind of procession on the main avenue and Randall wanted Lemmy to come see it with him. He found him in the library with Lawyer, playing checkers.

“We’re in the middle of a game,” Lemmy complained when Randall asked him to go outside.

“ _I’m_ keeping clear of crowds,” Lawyer said. “Have you seen me? I’ll be crucified.”

Lemmy made a wrong move and Lawyer kinged himself. “Not so fast!” Lemmy protested.

“Here is a new thing in the Land,” Lawyer said. “A man accusing a giant of haste.”

“Come on, Lemmy, you can play checkers later.”

“You can’t play checkers after we’re broken down into hydrogen,” Lemmy said. He was lucid, polite, aware; but each new immersion in the stream of memory had carried him further from his Evening existence and its events.

“Goooood,” Lawyer said carefully.

“Yeaaaaah,” Randall said slowly, backing out of the room.

* * *

Someone was selling roundels in different colors from a stand. Randall spent too long shopping and the proprietor started yelling at him.

“I’m not the only man or the oldest man,” Randall said, “who found it hard to find a cockade, white, black, red or tricolour, to his taste. Cut me some slack.”

“You must put on the tricolour,” the street vendor said. “They will not dare to touch that.”

Randall, tenth generation of farmers cheated by wool-buyers, kept his wits about him and checked the price tags. “Of course you’d say that! It’s three times as much.” Caught in his trick, the vendor could only shrug and grin.

Wearers of white cockades were not lacking. They kept the wall in twos and threes, and walked with raised chins, and hands on sword-knots, and were watched askance by the commonalty. There was something unutterably new, strange, formidable in this reverence; this respect paid by these savages to a word, a ribbon, an idea.

Randall’s hand hovered over the red. “I have not heard of any party adopting that,” the vendor said with the tone of someone forced to concede a point. He rubbed his bald head a little doubtfully. “Still, it is a colour we don’t like here.”

Randall finally settled on the white one in memory of the ancien regime. It seemed to fit some buried or nascent part of himself, long suppressed, now coming to the fore.

### Able was I ere I saw Elba

The townsfolk were sugared up and delighted; the cops had greased the lampposts; if the Maple Leafs had won the Cup there couldn’t be a better party in Toronto than this air of festivity in Camelon. Paddy Fein the Peddler or some version of him was hawking suspect puddings in the shade.

Randall fought his way up to see what’s what. The jeering crowds pressed up against the police barriers were making life hell for the poor fools that just needed to cross Broadway.

Eight horses drew a heavy cart down the street; the crowd’s ecstatic ire doubled when it came into view. Bricks and dead cats flew at the cart, or near it, most sailing past to brain someone in the crowd.

The cart bore an iron cage. At each corner of the cage, an Ageless Sensei pumped an alternating current of electricity into the bars; the oscillation of the fields created a magnetic moment which kept the contents of the cage physically isolated.

Two methodist ministers rode along them as well, asking biographical questions for the Newgate calendar.

The prisoner’s eyes had a power of their own; they fell on the crowd like gravity. Cool and indifferent but trembling with unhealed wounds he aimed to mount the scaffold. The townsfolk were driven to their knees by the weight of his presence. Randall only kept his feet.

“When I do stare,” the prisoner said, “see how the subject quakes.” He noticed one boy in the crowd still standing, and had the drivers stop. Randall’s analeptic visions, striking always at the worst time, struck now; he saw a gladiator, holding a golden crown above the prisoner’s head, heard him chanting “Memento mori”.

“I wept and wept,” the prisoner said in the sudden silence, “because no one was found who was worthy to open the scroll or look inside.”

“You’re taking this better than I would,” Randall said.

“All of philosophy is training for death.” The prisoner held out one palm, testing the invisible cage that bound him more than the iron bars; the air turned to moire where he met the magnetic shield. He wore a white roundel on his shoulder, like Randall’s, but his signifying innocence of crime.

“The Senseis are right to fear you.” Randall was glad he came out to meet this man. “Even bound, you’re every inch a king. I hope I do as well when it’s me on trial.” Randall decided that he quite liked this man. “O, let me kiss that hand!”

“Let me wipe it first”, the prisoner said. “It smells of mortality.”

But the impatient drivers whipped the horses. The crowd stirred. A well-aimed dead cat slipped through the bars and whinged off the magnetic shield. “Burning, scalding, stench, consumption,” the prisoner yelled at the mob. “Fie, fie, fie!” They only rioted worse. The prisoner shook his head. “You’re showing frightful political immaturity.”

“Who was that, anyway?” Randall asked a marauding townsfolk wearing a viking beer helmet.

“Llallogan, the Masih ad-Dajjal, on his way to the gibbet.”

### The orchard walls are high and hard to climb

Randall looked at Llallogan and saw himself in a cage; he wanted to see how this man lived and died so he could face his own fate with the same balls and composure. This crowd, though, was ruining it for him. He sought the high ground.

What he found, in the waterlogged meadow, well beyond the river’s sedges, was something remarkable: a high-walled garden green and old.

The wall was no trouble to him. He peeked inside from the top and saw it was some sort of deer park, a playground of the rich with nothing to threaten him. He watched in peace from his height as Llallogan’s cart threaded through the mob.

(respice finem), someone whispered in the softest possible voice, barely a breath, at his shoulder. Randall ignored it at first, thinking it was another past-life memory, but someone tapped him and said (hey).

He turned, saw it was a girl his age, and promptly fell backwards.

(… all right?) she was saying. (are you alright?)

Randall sat up quickly. “I can’t understand you,” he said. “Ask me what year it is.”

(What year is it?) the girl mouthed.

“Can you speak up?”

The garden or park was a realm of pleasance, with many a mound and shadow-checkered lawn. It was full of the city’s steely sounds but also deep myrrh-thickets, stately cedar, thick rosaries of scented thorn, and obelisks graven with the emblems of time.

“She asked what year it is,” a man said. He was blessed with sapphire blue eyes and movements a dancer might envy, without doubt the handsomest man Randall had ever seen. He was also armed; long fingers hovered just shy of drawing, and twitched when Randall moved.

“Ninety-nine,” Randall said, crossing his fingers they wouldn’t ask him for the century.

(do you know where you are?) the girl asked, continuing the concussion check.

“Do you know where you are?” the dancer asked.

“Camelon. I climbed a wall to watch the procession and fell into –” he waved at his surrounding. “This place, whatever it is.”

“The palace garden,” the dancer said. Randall whistled. “And the place death, considering who thou art.”

“Who am I?”

“An armed trespasser.” Never letting his sword hand stray too far from his belt, the man nodded at Randall’s weapon.

(let him die on his feet, at least), the girl said. She helped Randall to rise and leaned him against a tree.

“Thank you.” Randall didn’t draw yet but he faced off at the dancer as he had seen Lance do. “Before we draw, shall we exchange names?”

“I can’t fault your manners.” The dancer bowed. “Galahad. They call me Blanchemains, for reasons of a circulatory impairment that shouldn’t affect the business at hand.”

(i’m elaine of astolat). “My sister Elaine,” Galahad translated.

“Your brother scares me,” Randall said. “I think he might be capable of anything.”

The dancer bowed again. “I thank you, sir.” He cocked an ear. “Company. We’ll have to postpone our duel.”

A crotchety lady entered the clearing, her joints ancient but her forehead characteristically botox-smooth. “Came to see Llallogan, eh? I was against this – I would have done his witch trial in the back of a van and severed him myself.”

“Severed? Who are you?”

The Sensei rolled her eyes. Hot on her heels entered a barbershop quartet complete with striped suits and hats. “Well? Announce me, you twats.”

They started into Lida Rose but she waved them to silence. “Enough, too late, too late. Leave us.”

Galahad gracefully filled in the gap. “Lida Rigney Roi Mahaignie,” he said, “Ageless Sensei, court necromancer, and keeper of the potter’s field at Aendor.”

“Yes, severed,” she said. “Not executed, though it might be kinder. It’s what we do to all the men.” She freshened her lipstick, coloring outside the lines a little, and pulled up her silver bun. “Under the shock of their severance, they lose their motivation; they let their self-treatments slide, and become either actively or passively suicidal.”

The camera moved in on her eyes, dark holes without wrinkles or mercy. “The patients who survive,” Lida said, frowning as if survival wasn’t the goal, “find someone somewhere who is willing to help them want to live.”

Randall became upset thinking of his proud role model so reduced. “Who is this wrinkled bag?” he asked.

Lida still hadn’t fully registered Randall’s presence but Elaine cringed and Galahad stepped between them. “Mind your tone,” the dancer warned. “She is a visionary possessed of great oracular power.”

“What power?” Randall angled his sword dangerously but still held off drawing; Galahad was clearly a man who could dissect him in a real fight.

Lida’s face puckered.

“Hist,” Galahad said. “Just watch. You’re truly fortunate to see – here it comes.”

Lida spouted some ancien regime french and took a paper strip from her white clutch.

“A thin skin only, taut as a drumhead, separates us from the future.” Galahad said, not just respectful but actively frightened of the entranced Sensei. “Events leak through it reluctantly, with a faint buzzing sound, if they make any noise at all –”

A growling sound arose, like eerie unison chanting or misaligned plumbing. She placed the paper strip on the ground and knelt, or perhaps squatted, over it.

“What –” Randall started, and Galahad interrupted him with a ‘shh’ gesture. “What are we seeing,” Randall whispered.

“Lida has the gift of micturition hindsight,” Galahad explained. “She urinates only rarely, but at those times she can view the recent past with near-perfect insight.”

(near-perfect), Elaine mouthed, rolling her eyes.

Randall held very still, knowing the outcome was subject to so many variables that his slightest movement created vast shiftings in the pattern.

Lida rose and picked up the strip of paper. She looked at Randall with new caution, if still no fear. She held up the strip, the edge of which had turned a color, and held it up to Randall’s face, approaching closely as if she were his doctor or tailor.

“You’re a six,” she said. “You carry the Jason Taverner gene.”

“I read about them in Time,” Galahad said. “Aren’t they all dead now? Didn’t the government have them all rounded up and shot?”

Randall fidgeted. “Think of him like a celebrity no one’s ever heard of,” Lida said. “With vast projective charisma that can turn events. But the timing –”

(what about the timing?) Elaine asked.

Lida shook her head. She could never understand Elaine. “The events of the Kerioth Cycle are coming to fruition. We could be in for a bad time.”

An older gentleman joined them, still in his prime only in his own mind, mustachioed, uniformed in double-breasted coat with black Goodyear buttons, armed identically to the dancer. “General,” Lida said, inclining her head.

“Master Brooks,” Galahad said in respectful greeting, saluting, Elaine mouthing along.

“Who have we here?” the new arrival said, looking at Randall and catching the one detail that mattered. “That’s a lot of knife for a kid your age.”

“We have passed through much to fit us for this,” Randall said.

“A sword is a sword,” Lida said. “What difference the type?”

“You are in the quarry still,” Randall said, not that Lida was listening, “not complete, and much seems inexplicable.”

Galahad looked at her in horror and the general shook his head. “It’s an antique of a model they don’t make anymore. I doubt he earned it.”

“Stolen then?” Lida scoffed. “Cut off his hands and buy him a bus ticket.”

The general looked again, past the sword, letting himself see the whole person. “Look at how he stands there, how he shines among his warriors, like the moon among the stars. Well it fits him, and he it. Could satan’s clutches snatch the sword, he would winnow in a tempest and throw the best away. But the sword is in a wise and faithful hand.”

The general’s cryptic statement stirred the dregs of prophecy in Lida’s bladder. “But he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” She shivered. “And none of this explains where he got it.”

Randall thought he could go with the truth here. “A man can say: It was the property of my father.”

Everyone relaxed. “I can respect that.” The general extended a hand. Randall clasped it. “Randall Thorpe,” he said.

“Garth Brooks.”

### A gelding gone wrong

“Am I to be gelded then?”

These Senseis didn’t have the botox look; when he searched their faces for serene calm he found wrinkled foreheads and haunted eyes. They descended on him, carrying lanterns in the dark damp, making silhouettes of the dungeon bars dance on the ceiling.

It was neither the lights nor the cage that drew his eye; the shadows in the darkness at the edge of the room crawled, compressing the circle of light like a submarine in deep water or a squid dragging down its prey.

The senseis put their lamps on the floor and clapped, slowly, in unison, to a beat. They stepped forward, just one step, together, stamping on the floor in time to the clap. When they landed they gyrated their hips.

It was a dance, mostly percussion, but the oppressive rippling motion at the edge of vision came with music; soft, and minor key; it was like chanting, but when he listened closely, it could be the howling of mortal pain, a symphony of torture. He had encountered more pain than music in his life.

He had studied the legal formula of course, in books; everyone did who entered his profession, not because they recognized themselves as false prophets but just to understand the cost of failure. His source didn’t mention a dance, or a dungeon, or a circle of dying light. Darkness kindled back into beginning at the edge of sight.

A dead clock burned the hour on the wall. As the Senseis stopped advancing and circled him, shuffling sideways, still taking one loud step in time to the clapped beat, one knelt and filled a cup with wine, which caught fire and burned like brandy.

Something human-shaped stepped from the shadows, or took form from them, ignoring the rhythm, stepping through it unconsciously like a blind person crossing the street, just happening to miss all the cars. The new arrival was blind, or at least where its eyes would be were flaps where its marble skin bruised green.

The kneeling Sensei offered it the cup and it drank without a care for the heat. The dregs in the cup burned to tireless death.

“I know your kind.”

 _Yes_ , it mouthed, mute. “Yes,” chorused the dancing, unserene Senseis.

“Shall we fight?”

The merlin-thrall dropped the cup; it didn’t shatter; it didn’t even make a sound as glass hit stone. It landed on its edge and balanced, writhing to the ground like a magnet dropped on copper.

 _No need_ , it mouthed. The Senseis voiced it.

“What, then?”

It whispered. The Senseis chorused: “Dance out the souls of the faithful that darkness may enter in.”

He struggled to keep away, scrabbled against the lichenous stone to draw back to the limit of his shackles. Goat-faced morlocks came up behind him and held down his arms. The merlin-thrall stepped close and cupped his chin with gentle fingers. His head was stuck fast as if in a vise. It positioned him precisely – six inches forward, five inches back.

Its throat pulsed and heaved like a bullfrog’s, but pale translucent gray, with dark guts rushing under the surface. It vomited its black bile into his mouth.

Llallogan felt his resistance clarify to despair, crypto-satanism taking hold of his soul.

“Oh, morlock, morlock,” he said with his last untarnished will. “Why have you Forsaken’d me.”

He turned to one of the goat-faced morlocks holding him. “Put your dukes up,” he whispered, wishing to go out fighting.

The morlock raised its arms topped with rubbery, thumb-less goat cloppers. “I don’t have any dukes,” it grated in apology.

### Should old acquaintance be forgot

Nimue excelled her best tracking the kids inside the city but had finally lost the trail. Randall’s familiar bootprints put them in the right direction from the city gate; he stepped in a particularly smelly, juicy shit at some point and for a while the smell of it led them onward. But now they were at a splitting of the way and the trail was cold.

Nimue had been growing more and more anxious and was now covered in sweat. She slumped against the post of the street sign marking the fork. Lance and Morainn caught up with her and the city traffic streamed around them. It was a sunny afternoon. Nimue felt sick.

The scene was oppressive. The crowd, dense, yet silent, that filled the Square and all the neighbouring ways; the air of expectancy, the closed shops, the cessation of business, the whispering groups in alleys and at doors.

“No good?” Morainn said, sympathetically for once; she respected Nimue’s effort and skill after watching her follow the smallest possible signs through the warren here.

Nimue’s whole reason for leaving Aymon’s Field was finding the young boys. For the first time she contemplated failure. Her plan became unravelled and she started to hyperventilate. “Shhh,” Morainn said, kneeling by her. “Shhhh. Here.” She gave her a xanax.

“Hey!” called a familiar voice. “You were right. They _are_ here.”

Lance had gone to buy bottled water for them and Nimue was pretty out of it. Morainn whirled. It was Egg and Jacob, Bella in tow.

“You’re not the two we were tracking,” Morainn said unnecessarily, “but welcome nonetheless. How did you find us?”

Jacob tapped his nose.

“We tracked you,” Egg said. “I wasn’t sure he would be able to in the city, but he said he could and so we did. Man, have we got a story for you.”

“Before that – have you seen the other boys?”

Jacob tapped his nose again, and then pointed at one of the forks. Morainn nodded. “For lack of choice, we’ll try it your way.”

To Jacob, the scent trail was like day-glo, like spilled paint in the street; only 30 hours off from the full moon, his animal senses were nearly at peak. Marathon tobacco drew him like a gong, a bell, and the sweaty, radioactive tang of Mashhad made it unmistakeable.

Nimue was done. Lance draped her over her saddle and walked by her horse so she didn’t slide off onto the street.

They entered the hotel together. “Gil here?” Lance asked at the desk. The clerk shook his head, and the group hung out at the bar instead, coating Lance’s base layer of beers from the road with a delicate glaze of scotch and stale bar nuts.

Randall came back from his ordeal at the palace to find them passed out at the bar. He shook Lance; Lance went for his sword but had propped it up in the corner. Then he recognized Randall and woke Morainn with a small bump of naloxone.

“What room for the tab?” the bartender asked.

“We’ll split it,” Morainn said. “Charge my half to Alys Buckman.”

“And mine goes to Andra Polytropos,” Lance said.

“You’re saying you’re guests of the hotel? Or that you want me to bill those people for your drinks?”

“It sounds perfect,” Morainn said, not really listening. Her diplomatic immunity was more than equal to bar tabs and parking tickets. Most bars didn’t serve Senseis for this very reason. The bartender smacked his forehead; she had come in with a headband so he didn’t see the botox.

“We’ve been dreaming,” Randall said, when they were all served with coffees in Tommy’s suite. “About a bad guy with a burnt face, in a christmas sweater, with a black-haired woman. Lemmy and I had the same dream, more or less. Can he find us?”

Morainn sighed. “Here.” She gave him a dreamcatcher. “Put this up where you sleep.” That reminded her. “Where is young Lemmy? You weren’t separated?”

“No,” Randall frowned. “He’s sleeping, I think. He’s been sleeping a lot.” He knocked on the door to the bedroom. “You up?”

Morainn shouldered past him and went in on her own. “What is it, boy? Are you sick? Where are you?”

Randall threw open the blinds. Lemmy was curled up in one corner of the room. He squinted and covered his eyes against the light. “Leave me,” he said. “I’m resting.”

The room dimmed again. “Leave those blinds open, you,” Morainn said.

“I did,” Randall said. “I am.” Lemmy had touched the bare blade of the knife he’d picked up, dimming the whole room. Morainn hissed.

“Bring it here,” she said to Lemmy. “Drop it on the bed.”

“It’s mine,” he whined, hardly his voice.

“Do it. You’ll have it back in a moment, I promise.” He dropped it on the white sheets. It looked cheap and harmless, frail and segmented like the blade of a snap-off boxcutter without the handle. Morainn shook her head. “Trust a teenager to pick up something sharp.”

“It’s a Carnwennan,” Morainn explained. “Missing its hilt. Not to be confused with _carnelian_ which is something else (though not what people mistake it for).” She had lost them. “It shrouds its bearer in shadow. Which sounds like a convenient thing, I know, but has some downsides.”

Lance rolled in with her gear. In her case she found a roll of duct tape. She put on latex gloves so she wouldn’t have to touch the blade with her skin, then wrapped the bottom of the blade in duct tape. “There,” she said. “You see? A handle for it. That’s a little safer.” Lemmy took it back.

There was a long thump against the door like a sack of potatoes being dropped into a crate. Randall winced. “That’s for me.” The giant Lawyer loomed in the doorway, slouching to get in and holding his hands apologetically.

“A giant, eh?” Morainn said. “Hail, Rockbrother! What can I do you for.”

“These matters do not come easily,” Lawyer said, “though easier to me than to any of my kindred – and for that reason I was chosen. But I will endeavor to speak hastily.”

A goal he failed to achieve. After 5 minutes of this he was still listing his ancestors and the french names of ruined cities.

“Let me cut you off,” Morainn said. “You want to ride with us? Civil practice or criminal?”

“I dabble,” Lawyer said, caught off guard.

“You can never know too many lawyers,” Morainn said. “You’re invited. You don’t need a horse do you?”

“I’m too big. I will run beside you. It is not so far.”

“Any homesickness issues? Shtetl withdrawal?”

“The matchmakers are after me, but I’ll live.”

“Good man.”

### Perceval revient du bois

Tommy left them, unable to leave the comforts of his suite and the city, but an unexpected addition joined them at the city gate.

(it’s me), she said, waving at Randall. It was Elaine from the palace. (are you headed to the ivory tower? i’m headed that way myself).

Morainn was disgusted with her. “I can’t understand what she’s saying,” she complained to Lance. “Does she want to come with us?”

(hi), Egg mouthed at her.

(hi!), Elaine said, tears standing out in her eyes. Up to now only her brother could understand her. She explained her identity and situation to Egg Ween, who relayed it to Morainn.

“Do we really need one more?” Lance asked. “This is already a big group.”

Morainn shrugged. “At least this one has an Amex card. I can’t believe how many places wouldn’t take my Diner’s Club.”

Elaine noticed Lance and didn’t stop noticing. (he, by right, should take me to the fair!). Lance, who didn’t process anything under 5’3", and of course couldn’t hear her, had no idea.

And so they took to the road again. Nimue ranged ahead, using her keen senses to scout for danger and happy to have a job. Lance led the train, in his camo, and strange designs worked into the weave of the garment seemed to shift and writhe as he moved. Behind him Morainn, then the two girls, laughing and lip-reading as they traded secrets. Then Randall, telling stories to Jacob who didn’t really understand.

Second to last, Lawyer. The Giant carried in his belt a quarterstaff as tall as a man, and wore a blue neck-scarf that fluttered ebulliently in the morning breeze.

And finally, Lemmy, downcast eyes ignoring the road as he tried to pick the duct tape off his shiv.


	6. Six Months in a Convent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The oath rod makes its debut. Lemmy Caution gets exercised (sick!). Nimue thought she could reach the finish line without having a croak dream of her own, fat chance. She does her best not to drink more than is necessary.

### Approaching the ivory tower

Traffic was light as they merged onto the highway. Lemmy, starting to sicken again as his chelation therapy wore off, fell back into delirium and monologuing.

“I wonder if I could have been here before,” he said.

The others ignored him so he spoke again. “As I drive up the Roman road the Theater seems familiar – perhaps I headed a legion up that same white road.”

They were under doctor’s orders not to indulge him but Nimue the Bane of Merlin could never keep her mouth shut. “What?”

“I passed a chateau in ruins which I possibly helped escalade in the middle ages.”

Morainn brought her horse back down the line to inject a sedative. It was difficult; after weeks like this, his veins were pretty blown. As she left him, she said softly, “There is no proof nor yet any denial.”

Randall kind of felt it too. He held Lemmy by the shoulder. “We were, we are, and we will be,” he said, trying to be reassuring.

* * *

Morainn floored the gas to catch up with Lance. They argued about something and she had to resort to a neural shock to get his obedience. He rode back to the others. “We’re getting off at the next exit.”

“Is it the ivory tower?” Egg asked, ready to start her new life.

“You don’t seem happy about it,” Nimue said. She had been giving him more backtalk lately and he took it without complaint.

“We’re taking a detour,” Lance said.

Lemmy kept his bruised eyes on his horse, hearing nothing that took place in the present, but Randall couldn’t help glancing at his friend. “He’s –” He lowered his voice and paced Lance on the offramp. “He’s worsening quickly now,” he said softly. “We need to get him into treatment.”

Lance was still and calm as ever but more often lately his muscles seemed to be fighting his bones; now he fought so hard he shook from it. “Talk to _her_ ,” he said. “I made the same point. But she said he’d live and that you boys aren’t her only duty.”

Randall frowned but let it pass. He was disturbed, as Nimue sometimes was, by Morainn’s treatment of Lance.

* * *

A sculpture of a giant hand marked a sarai area with a C+ Mickey D’s and some B+ toilets. Huge and of stone, the hand impossibly turned in the wind like a weathervane. It was doing a vulcan salute. Randall felt warm as they passed it.

Morainn dropped back to whisper at him. “The Chandigarh Hand,” she murmured. “There are many like it but this one is the largest, and the only one that turns on the wind as if alive.”

Randall licked his lips. Somewhere, lightning slithered to ground from the cloudless sky, slow and clean. The thunder-crack was crystalline, thrumming, with overtones like windchimes. Pollen on the air burst into its mature form, raining roots and petals on them.

Morainn slapped Randall’s horse and they were soon away from that place. “That was pretty odd,” Randall said as if he didn’t know what happened. Nobody bought it.

* * *

They passed a town called Llangollen and climbed the road to the burbs; there they found a place that was either a large house or a small mansion, with a simple floorplan and plaster walls but elaborately decorated with gothic accents. The bushes were sculpted into bulging and erupting, vaguely anatomical shapes that played electric guitars in the boys’ brains.

They parked and searched the grounds; Morainn found her friends out back gardening, inappropriately in full white tie, coat and tails plus top-hat, the hats extremely daring and insensitive given the state of the world and the crypto-satanist problem. A little dog chased itself in circles and got generally underfoot.

The ladies perked up and pointed out the visitors to each other. They recognized Morainn.

“Is this them?” asked the tall one, hunching a little as she walked over.

“Are these they,” the short one corrected.

They moved inside to a dusty dining room where the ladies unearthed a tin of butter cookies that someone had brought them some years back in trade. Nobody touched the cookies. They had an aura of gamy butter and intestinal distress.

“Lay it on me,” Morainn said. “Prophecy update.”

Their hosts, Eleanor and Sarah, peered at her through thick fresnel glasses. “Are you staying for dinner? We’re having tea.”

“Prophecy update! Please!” Morainn said. “You have no idea the kind of time pressure I’m under.”

“I’ll go put the tea on,” Sarah said. “No, focus, friend,” Eleanor said to her. “We must do the –”

“The prophecy update, yes. Acute famine, lack of shame, crypto-satanists, interest-bearing loans – the usual markers of decline. The seals of brittle corundum are still intact – as best we can determine, we haven’t seen them. There is only one test with any predictive clarity.”

“Chandrahas,” Morainn breathed. “Vajra. The lightning-diamond.”

“Still fast in the Dome of the Rock. Tyre is sound as ever,” Eleanor said.

“And in all your decades you’ve found nothing else?”

Sarah coughed and blushed. “Prophecy is hard to parse,” she said. “Have they decieived us? Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders.”

“I’m sorry,” Egg said, “I don’t mean to draw this out. Who or what is Chandrahas?”

“Nobody knows,” Eleanor cried balefully.

(then why are we talking about it), Egg mouthed. Only Elaine understood.

“We’re having vegetables,” Sarah said. “I’ll put them on now. Will you be staying for dinner?”

“That’s all we’ll get from them,” Morainn said, getting up from the table. “They’re sunsetting.”

Lemmy staggered and swallowed the taste of vomit when he left his seat. “I want someone to take me to the hospital.”

### Nimue’s initiation to the mysteries

The ivory tower – what is there to say about it? It should have been a Beaux-arts palace or a bland International pavilion, but instead the Senseis commissioned a ‘temple of the spirit’ and rubbed the monkey’s paw, and got this.

A concept album to failed and forgotten religions, a seashell, an inverted ziggurat – it has been called many things. One theory is that when it was made, it was made so that none could see it twice in the same way; no wonder the critics don’t agree.

Its architecture reflects its politics: a shell whose form has no relation to its function. Visitors can’t escape the light shining in their eyes from narrow slots in the wall in place of windows, in the same way that the Senseis are inescapable once spurned.

They parked and went inside.

Inside the tower was a big spiral ramp hugging the wall. Lemmy was taken away in a gurney. The group was led upwards to their dorms and cafeterias and showers but Nimue the Bane of Merlin was separated from the others and led down to the dungeon level by a cheerful candy-striper named Sarah Coventry.

Here and there an Ageless Sensei shuffled past them, lost in thought or in a hurry, colorful signs of the tower’s active greek life adorning their simple stolas (a sort of double-breasted white toga).

Now Nimue was dragging her rolling luggage over the rough floor of what she suspected was the basement.

“Hey,” she said, trying to get the candy-striper’s attention. “Hey, I know I’m just a little older than the other girls, but I think I should still do the whole –”

“We have risen two so far,” a voice came from a cracked-open door in the long, dark hall. “We shall be just as successful on more.”

Nimue stopped in her tracks.

“The living, they have no suspicion of your movements?”

“We had to dispose of one policeman. However, none of those risen have been seen. At least, not –”

“The Sarah Coventry isn’t supposed to talk to you,” the candy-striper piped, louder than necessary, cutting off the conversation in the room, referring to herself in the third person. “Sriram Sensei’s orders.”

“Okay,” Nimue said. They kept walking.

From another half-open door ahead came a dissonant song or chant. “Prince of darkness lord of evil,” went the first verse.

“What’s that?” Nimue asked her guide.

“Oh mighty pointed phallus!” went the second verse, louder.

“What’s what?” the candy-striper said. “The Sarah Coventry hears nothing.” She grabbed the handle of the door. “Let’s just nudge this shut.”

The third verse was louder yet and Nimue heard it quite clearly through the heavy door. “Make us your concubines.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“Sensei’s orders. Ah,” the candy-striper said. “Here we are. S-see ya later.”

The basement room was a bath area that had been drained so it was just an echoing tiled bowl, deeper basins in places, and drains with disturbing, rusty streaks leading into them. It was packed with dungeon and torture stuff, like the prop warehouse for a movie about the spanish inquisition. Silver jougs lined one wall and they were the least of what was available.

“Enter,” said a voice. “We’re down here.”

Nimue navigated into one of the drained basins; an awkward staircase hugged the wall. A bunch of Senseis were set up at a table with tarot cards but also seemed to have a poker game gong. “We’ve been waiting,” one of them said, dealing the next hand, “for quite some time.”

Sriram Sensei, dean of the freshman class and also faculty advisor for initiations, as well as (self-appointed) dean of discipline, took the lead. “You’re late,” she said. “Time and tide and all that.”

“What am I doing here, you botox-faces?”

“We’ve talked it over,” Sriram said. “We’ve decided that despite your learning disability –”

“Hey.”

“Your serum heroin is off the chart. So you’re going to skip your freshman year.”

“You did a blood test?”

“Morainn did it on the road.”

Nimue gasped. “That’s a HIPAA violation.” Don’t get distracted, Nimue. “Answer the question. What. Am I. Doing here.”

A toothless, decaying hag, beautiful forehead smooth as milk, spoke next. “We’re going to do your initiation right now.”

“What if I say nay?”

“Then we’ll burn your transfer credits,” Sriram said. “And you’ll have to redo your whole first year. And I sense,” she said, putting on a firm expression but ruining it by licking her lips, “that you lack discipline.”

Nimue got the picture. “Let’s get this over with.”

The Senseis cleaned up the poker cards and set the tarot deck at the center of the table and began the formula. They took down their stolas to the waist. “In prison, your life story is written on your body.” They were coated with tattoos, everything you could think of – full-sleeve fish and tigers, rosie the riveter, one-stroke-removed CJKs, maiden name in greek, really everything.

One of them had LOVE and HATE on her knuckles but you didn’t need the shirts off to see that – she had to remove her fingerless gloves.

The old one drew a card. “The mantis,” she said, so distressed that she put the card in her mouth and lightly bit it. “Do we still know how to do that one?”

“Is that a bad one,” Nimue asked. Nobody answered her.

“See the mantis,” the crone said, her toothless voice creaking like a dissolving rocking chair, “praying at the moon beneath three arches.”

“The first is for something new,” the pretty one said.

“The second for injustice,” said a nondescript Sensei.

“And under the third arch all will be made different,” Sriram said, taking back control. “Something taken away long ago is now returned.”

A porter dragged in a heavy metal archway, messing up the mosaic pretty badly.

Sriram broke tone and came over to conference with Nimue sotto voce. “Real talk for a second, you signed a waiver on your way down here right?”

“No. This is safe, right?”

“There are dimensions in which you are completely incapable,” Sriram Sensei said, waving vaguely. “If through some molecular disturbance you fell into one of these it is possible that you could not find your way back. It’s mostly safe.”

“Deal a different card, then.”

Sriram shrugged. The ritual resumed. It was the crone’s turn to read. “The gods send all men to choose another life.”

“Who seeks,” a Sensei read, “and will not take when once tis offered, shall never find it more.”

“Be ye stedfast,” the crone recited, “unmoveable; your labour is not in vain. Opportunity knocks but once.”

“Most importantly,” Sriram said, breaking tone again, “don’t drink anything. Seriously.”

The metal ring expanded to fill Nimue’s whole vision. An arch, and through it gleamed a world whose margin faded when she moved. It consumed her.

“Keep concentrating and don’t forget – keep walking!” The instruction came from nowhere and everywhere.

Sparks flashed continually about her feet, she no longer knew which direction she faced. The currents swept through her and it seemed her eyeballs were vibrating. A pins-and-needles feeling in her cheeks and a coldness on the back of her neck.

“Don’t stop, whatever you do, and don’t stray from the path.” After that, the instructions were too faint to hear.

She crash-landed in a pleasant river valley, doing some damage to the precious, fertile topsoil, standing and dusting herself off. It was important that she find … what? Nimue hurried on, wondering why she was so nervous, wishing she could remember what she was searching for.

Something flashed in her peripheral field. A curious complex twist of silver the meaning of which retreated. Whatever. _Keep walking_ , she remembered. “Fine,” she said, “but not because you said so.”

There was a crowd. Perhaps they had been there when she landed and she hadn’t noticed them. Their faces were – she couldn’t see. They had on concealing robes, but she could tell from the smell of them that some had been renewed to health and youth in death, others hideously burned from the crossing.

They hiked together over a hill, seldom talking, penetrating further into the valley, the light changing as clouds changed, or the earth turned, or the seasons changed. They were heading to a shaft of rainbow light on the horizon. Time and space moved in jumps.

They reached the source of the light – it was the Spindle of Necessity. A broad river of light flowed around it. As they approached the river, the rest of creation dimmed in comparison. Soon they were kneeling by the riverside, and the valley around them seemed thrown into night as their eyes adjusted.

“Is this your first frat party,” asked one of the robed strangers. _Don’t drink anything_ , Nimue remembered.

“You’re a little old to be a freshman,” someone else said. _Don’t drink anything_.

A nice party organizer came up to her and shooed away the peer-pressurers. “You don’t have to drink anything. We have other options.” The organizer took Nimue to a folding table set up on the grass. There was a bowl of red liquid with slices of – probably fruit floating at the top.

“What’s in the punch?” Nimue asked.

* * *

She was spat from the arch like being born, or like the final stage of digestion, or like being rejected from a stomach. She threw up into a convenient drain in the mosaic pool-bottom.

“Did you drink anything?” Sriram Sensei asked intently.

“Nope,” Nimue said between heaves. “No. Definitely not.” She held up a finger to have a second and caught her breath. “Why do you ask?”

Someone had a hot towel and she took it gratefully, pressing it to her face.

“I didn’t remember who I was,” she said. “How did I have the presence of mind to escape?”

Sriram shrugged. “Everything in this strange system is the reverse of what it pretends to be. You get used to it.” She cleared her throat. “Moving on.”

Nimue had been in there for a while. The Senseis were bored and sleepy. “When people fall into danger,” the nondescript one read half-heartedly, “they are then able to strive for victory.” The crone had been much more into her role.

The Senseis shooed Nimue back into the arch. Lights, camera, action.

The dead were everywhere, huddled in doorways, crumpled in corners, stretched out on the floor as though trying to crawl to safety, tendons like taut wire along the bone, bones held together with a bit of skin and desiccated flesh.

She’s trying to heal them but there’s nothing to heal, but at the same time they’re asking her for help, she seems to know them. Dreams are weird.

She has her medical bag with her and is putting bandaids and stuff on limbs that are about to fall off.

She kept up like that for a while. There was nothing to heal, these were corpses in an advanced state of decomposition. But she treated it like a triage. She secreted heroin at a dangerous titer to run full body scans and extract bullets, not that the dead were any less dead at the end.

They spoke to her, and the more she spoke back the more they took on the aspects of people she knew. Finally one of them was familiar enough to recognize – a face, Egg’s face, on a flap of healthy skin on an otherwise rotten and flayed carcass. “You left us,” it said.

She turned away; suddenly everything in this space had Egg’s face – the door-knocker, the bedposts, the links of the chain that burst from the soil like a leaping dolphin and pinned her down. The silver arch appeared. Everything was smoke and mist –

* * *

“Whew!” Nimue missed a step on her way out because the arch was on a slope but was otherwise fine. “That wasn’t so bad.”

“The second is the easiest,” Sriram said. “Don’t celebrate yet. You’re not Usain Bolt. You have more to do.”

The crone Sensei lifted her stale wrist and extended a bony finger back at the arch.

Nimue, still bright-eyed with proud accomplishment, turned back to the arch. The metal had tarnished – or not tarnished, but transformed entirely to translucent, marbled horn. She remembered a legend and inhaled sharply.

“Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,” Nimue said, “answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that _will_ be, or are they shadows of things that may come to pass?”

The Senseis looked troubled. Nobody answered.

Sriram cleared her throat. “Let’s finish the formula.”

“Much has been taken from us,” the nondescript Sensei said. “We are not now that strength which in the ancien regime moved earth and heaven,” the pretty one said.

“We have been made weak by time and fate,” said the one with LOVE and HATE tats on her canucks. “So you must be strong in will: to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.”

Nimue stepped into the arch. This time the transition into the dream world was slower. The arch rotated around her in a slow sweep, bending sound and light as it went. The light grew around her.

“Can you continue?” Sriram asked. Her voice was weird through the doppler from the spinning arch.

“I’m –” Nimue’s voice sounded strange in her ears. “If you can hear me, I’m okay to go.”

“My god!” one of the Senseis said; the light had grown so great that she could see her skeleton through her botoxed skin.

“I’m picking up tremendous EMI levels around the machine,” the pretty one said. “We’re approaching our abort limits.”

Nimue heard none of it. “Okay to go,” she said, hyperventilating now. “Okay to –” She felt faint. The arch locked with a final click, and she was elsewhere.

* * *

Or almost elsewhere. She paused in the tunnel; she didn’t know she was in a tunnel until she stopped. It was brightly lit, too bright to see any details of the walls or floor, but someone was there with her. (okay to go), she said faintly.

The companion resolved into a body but she couldn’t see the face. “Hi, Sparks.”

Nimue shook her head. “None of this is real. You – downloaded my memories.”

The face started to resolve. Nimue looked away, tears in her eyes.

“That’s my scientist,” the companion said. “I paused your wormhole for a second.”

“The Senseis – they all travel here through the transit system that you built.”

“We didn’t build it. It was ready long before we got here.”

“Is this a test?” Nimue was facing away now, still not wanting to look. The companion put its hand on her shoulder and she screwed her eyes even tighter. As nostalgic as this was it was also kind of terrifying.

“No tests.” He thought about it. “Well, maybe. I stopped you because the third ring is difficut in proportion to your serum heroin. You – well, it’s going to be a lot.”

“I mean, dial it down, then, right?”

“This is the way it’s been done for billions of years.” His voice faded and the touch on her shoulder became unsubstantial, reduced to a wind. “My time grows short. Remember always that you are just a visitor here, a traveler passing through.” The bridge of light began to rumble and move again like a moving sidewalk overcoming its coefficient of static friction.

“Your stay is but short and the moment of your departure unknown.” The touch vanished and Nimue felt herself picked up by the wind like a doll. Imagine being flushed down a toilet made of fiber optics and you’ll understand what Nimue experienced.

Her ego memory was strained out of her and her identity ate itself.

“With this understanding, summon strength and walk on.” Nimue dissolved like wet kleenex.

* * *

Nimue is on the table. She’s giving birth. She recognizes the sensations without having ever experienced them. “Shiiiiit,” she said. The pain is hard to describe but Nimue had heard that it was bad and this is bad.

A nurse was by her side. “Push, lady.” Her eyes were black, large, beautiful, but also a gateway to somewhere else; a world of flecks, and there was some leakage, the berudim tickling across her sclera. Her hair matched her eyes. Her face reflected the silver moon when she looked up.

“Are you –”

“Shhh,” the dark lady said. “I am, but here I’m just your nurse.”

Nimue tried to concentrate on that and couldn’t; another detail from her fading real-world identity. “Who’s the dad,” she breathed.

“You have to push now,” said the woman with the black eyes. They’re beautiful here; in other dreams they had been knotted in hate or cold with anger but here they’re attentive, worried, reassuring, helpful.

The pain was less. She was in another scene and place; a room, not very large or handsome, but warm and full of comfort. Nimue was in a robe with a new baby. She had held many newborns as the town’s GP but they were mostly ugly lumps that didn’t do anything. This one made healthy eye contact, played with her hand, seemed on the verge of speaking. There was something in its gaze that said it understood her.

Nimue knew she had to get up and find her way out. She would wait just a little more time here to see what the baby would do next. And then she would get up and explore this house.

Outside the window, and this was high up, the second or third story, a silver arch ripped a hole in the air and spouted light.

A different nurse came in. “You can’t leave.” This one seemed to be part snake. “We’re all snakes here – nobody else in this universe has any milk. You’re the only one with any milk.”

Nimue stood, though it hurt. She set the baby gently on the warm seat. “This place isn’t real.”

“This place is real, that place is fake. You’re going to a fake place where you’ll be trapped.” The nurse elongated into a snake body and crocodile mouth. There may have been legs or not, it was hard to tell in the tangled-up scrubs.

“Are you the great serpent,” Nimue asked. “Is this a true dream?”

“I don’t know,” the crocodile mouth said. “It’s your dream. You tell me.”

Nimue remembered that she had a job to do wherever she was going back to. The baby coughed. She picked it up from the chair. In its eyes were tears. “Another idol has displaced me,” the baby said.

“ _What_.”

“I have no just cause to grieve,” the baby said. Its voice was a normal adult voice, as if its future self was speaking, like in Look Who’s Talking. It could have been Nimue’s own voice, but heard for the first time apart from the weird acoustics of being inside her own head. It was deep and true.

“All your other hopes have been merged into your mission. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one. Have I not?”

“I am not changed towards you,” Nimue said, tears in her eyes now.

“ _You are changed_. Today, tomorrow, yesterday – I release you.” The words echoed for years as Nimue experienced multiple times overlapping in an eyeblink. “May you be happy in the life you have chosen.”

“Choose,” the alligator-faced snake said. “The gate is rotating out of phase.”

Nimue glanced at the empty, cold bassinet, and hobbled to the windowsill holding the baby. She opened it with her free hand, letting the frost into the warm recovery room. It was night. She glanced at the ground. It was a long way to fall.

Nimue knelt on the windowsill and then leapt for the gate.

“Noooooo,” the serpent yelled, the scream fading as it turned to smoke and the walls to bare holodeck grid.

* * *

Nimue came to briefly. There were tubes in her throat. Her shirt was open and someone was spreading gel on her chest. “Take that thing away from her,” somebody snapped.

Later: “What –” Nimue swallowed. “what did I bring back with me?”

The Senseis avoided her eyes. Sriram, faculty advisor for initiations, had to answer. “It wasn’t human.” Her voice broke in the middle.

Sriram tried to comfort her. “Our best science tells us that nothing there is real.”

The great serpent / nurse had said the opposite. “Is that true?”

The other senseis chuckled. “Oh, Sriram never lies.”

The crone lifted Sriram’s arm so the stola sleeve fell down, revealing fresh, awful bruises. “She’s with the oath rod day and night.”

Sriram shrugged as if it were no big deal.

“Anyway, here,” the nondescript Sensei said. She set a folded, starched candy-striper apron on Nimue’s hospital gurney and carefully set a ring on top of it, gold and in the shape of a stylized great serpent. Letters engraved in the gold flashed in the light: ‘Tu Was Du Willst’. “When you’re ready to get up, this is yours.”

### Egg’s extra credit

Egg Ween was sent to a row of dusty offices in the back of the library’s special collections cage to pick up her extra credit. She knocked and eventually just went in.

There was an owl clamped onto a perch. Egg thought it was fake until a mucusy column of birdshit dripped out of it, and then she noticed that most of the horizontal surfaces in the room had some kind of bird excreta on them – whether full-on poop or just downy feathers.

A Sensei sat at the desk; she could almost be an owl hybrid morlock, for she seemed like an owl in her body language and giant round glasses. Of course she was lacking claws, beak or feathers that would truly make her a mutant. It was just a thought.

She was brainstorming hallmark cards when Egg walked in. It’s her side hustle. She hadn’t finished this one, she had writer’s block. ‘Something old, something new, something’ was as far as she had gotten. She sighed, slipped a crisp twenty into it, and dropped it on her important pile of subscription catalogs and partially-opened mail.

“What are you doing here again?”

“I’m here about dreams.”

“Ahhhh,” and Owl Sensei looked a little more awake. “You’re that one. Here.” From under the desk the Sensei got a sort of a neat leather satchel or briefcase, the sort of thing you’d buy for someone who was getting a law degree.

“Are these books? Who are you? I just got a room number.”

“I’m Vermin Sensei. And this is Carl Conrad Coriander’s bling bag. He was the last dreamer here before you.”

“Is this all?”

“If we knew everything,” Vermin Sensei said, “we wouldn’t need new blood.” She leafed through some of her notes; the paper was brittle and flammable. The others Senseis warned her that her desk was a fire hazard. “Not all the old knowledge is dead here. You have found teachers for yourself, and perhaps you will indeed grow in knowledge. But in this area, you’ll need to find _other_ teachers.”

“There’s nothing?”

“Ah, here.” Vermin read from her notes. “There is a land all dreamthieves have visited. It is a place where all dreams intersect. We call that Caer Arianrhod.” She skipped to another dog-ear. “Offers of guidance must never be trusted.”

Egg sighed. “The more I learn the more holes there are in my knowledge.”

The word ‘knowledge’ to Vermin was like the word ‘warm beer’ to Lance. It got her attention. “It can be confusing here in the early days; all the more because you’re fighting a war while you learn.”

“What does the enemy _want_? Nobody’s explained that to me yet.”

“They will in the end achieve not only a complete liberation from linear Time but also some vast indescribable affinity with the very fabric of the real.” Vermin racked her memory. “Ah, that’s from the Kerioth Cycle.”

“Prophecy is another hole in my knowledge. How do people see the future? Can dreamers do it?”

Vermin sighed. “The future is a faded song of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret, pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.” Even her metaphors were bookish. “Which reminds me. I have work to do.”

Egg got the hint and started to back out.

Vermin went back to her notes, reading to herself. “Numbers are nothing,” she muttered. “Strength counts. Of course. A narrow chance.”

Egg Ween left. That night she dreamt of a creature that was Vermin mixed with the owl, a woman-thing with wings for arms and birds’ claws for feet, building its home in a tree; the tree also had a serpent laying eggs in its roots. Randall strode onto the scene with an axe, and began to swing; he aimed sometimes at the serpent and sometimes at the owl but he always missed. When they finally vacated the roots and branches he felled the tree and made for himself a throne from the wood.

She sensed that it was truly Randall in the dream, but he was having his own dream of the battle, and in his dream, the bird-thing was his tormentor and was the agent of cyclic time, that he was her passive captive. The serpent was hidden in his dream. When Egg thought all this the serpent seemed to see her and acknowledge her presence, as if she was just a motif that added meaning to _its_ dream.

The bird and the serpent remade their homes in a nearby tree; it was no species Egg recognized. It bore some resemblance to the willow, though smaller and dryer. Randall did not sit in his throne, but burnt it; he glanced at the new tree, smaller, with its serpent and bird-lady, but didn’t molest them, didn’t even look straight at them; he just covered his axe and walked on.

### Rush info session

Sriram Sensei, dean of the freshman class and (self-appointed) dean of discipline, also was the faculty advisor for rush. If you think about it it makes sense; the skills are complementary. This was her favorite week of the year.

“I see some new faces in the crowd,” she said from her podium. “I bet you didn’t know you were arriving for _pledge week_.” She emphasized her point by hitting the podium with the black leather riding crop she carried around just in case she caught someone breaking the rules around campus.

It was a medium sized room, more than large enough to fit the entire frosh class these days. They were in folding chairs, the cool ones in back, the suck-ups in front, the useless betas in the middle.

“This is my _co-chair_ ,” Sriram said, “head cook Daphne.” Daphne was standing behind her, shaking with suppressed rage. She hadn’t wanted this but she owed Sriram a favor.

When Sriram’s ‘discipline’ got out of hand Daphne typically got assigned the student victims to save face. They were useless at their chores but better that than Sriram causing nerve damage. Co-chair of rush was a new low for her, but the Vestalium Maxima wouldn’t allow Sriram to ruin another freshman class with her antics.

“I’m proud to say this is the most diverse class we’ve ever had here,” Sriram went on. “Let’s do a survey. Raise your hand if you’re the first member of your family to pursue post-secondary education.”

None of the suck-ups in the front row qualified, and the back knew better than to engage. A few of the betas indulged this demeaning treatment and raised their hand. Some people will raise their hand for anything.

“Okay, tough crowd,” Sriram said with a laugh that completely failed to acknowledge her role in this hate crime of an info session. “Okay, raise your hand if you’re receiving any financial aid.”

More hands cautiously raised by students who thought this might be a requirement to keep their aid. “See, there you go, you’re warming up now,” Sriram said cheerfully. “Here’s one – let’s see our _LGBTQ_ students represent.”

A sea of shocked faces. A few cautious hands.

“Sorry, sorry,” Sriram said. “I didn’t mean to out anybody.” The combination of topics had temporarily sated her thirst for shame and she moved on to the next slide. “Let me tell you about our sororities. They’re organized around themes, or you might say _proclivities_.”

“The _pink_ sorority is for agriculture and selective breeding. They want to turn men into livestock.” Next slide. “The green sorority purges the pinks every fifty years or so.”

There was more nervous laughter; no one could tell if she was joking. “The grays only eat beige foods and fulfill their language credit with lojban.” A hand up in the back. “Question?”

“Aren’t there any ones for normal hobbies?” someone asked.

“Oh, of course,” Sriram said. “Ah, but I skipped the end of my diversity survey. Any non-believers in the light and the hope of salvation and rebirth?”

A few hands lifted up over flushed faces, angry and ashamed they were tricked into revealing this so early in their academic careers.

“I’m also proud to say that this year’s class is five percent women of color, up from our historical trend of zero. Raise your hand if you identify as …”

Elaine, who had lived a pretty sheltered existence up to now, tapped neighboring Egg Ween on the elbow. (hey. is white a color?)

(don’t ask that), Egg mouthed back.

Someone else asked a question. “We heard there’s a whole _brown_ sorority, is that true?”

Sriram smiled uncomfortably. “Haha yes, but it’s probably not what you’re thinking. That’s the quiet games sorority. They read books and do nerd stuff.”

Follow-up: “Oh then we heard that there’s a group for _black_ sisters –”

### The Vestalium Maxima

Egg and Elaine had been following a girl named Serena who hung around campus but wasn’t enrolled. She claimed to have met Randall on the road and was looking for him. Egg and Elaine suspected she was some kind of stalker and were stalking her to find out.

Today they followed her to the campus sanctuary, wherein were kept the various sacred objects which the college had collected over its long years as well as the sacred flame and a statue of an important early donor, Rhea Silvia, who had endowed their fitness center.

(she’s not doing anything!), Elaine mouthed. (we should go!).

But Serena was touching the relics, which there were signs not to do, and running her fingers possessively over the tapestries.

(I think she’s going to steal something), Egg said back. (let’s catch her at it).

Serena passed up the usual things one might steal from such a trove – radium daggers, fire-breathing rings, transdimensional portals, and various whips and rods. She probably didn’t have enough heroin in her glands to even operate them.

Finally she fixed on the most expensive thing in there – the statue of Rhea Silvia. The nails were only painted gold, but the necklace was a separate piece and she got that off and wore it herself.

A commanding presence stepped out from the deep shadows between some larger standing relics. It was a sensei in the now-familiar white roman stola but with an unusual technicolor scarf.

“Hi,” Serena said, playing this one as cool as she could.

The sensei had a cigarette lighter and a squeeze-bottle of mineral spirits and was flicking the lighter absently. Serena thought that being set on fire might be the punishment for stealing here and stayed out of range.

“Bid them that they make fringes in the borders of their garments, and that they put upon the fringe of the borders a ribband of blue,” the sensei said.

(let’s go!), Elaine mouthed.

Egg Ween shook her head. (I want to see this).

“I was just looking,” Serena said, still backing away.

“And it shall be unto you for a fringe, that ye may look upon it,” the sensei said. “And that ye seek not after your own heart and your own eyes, after which ye use to go a-whoring.”

“Keep _away_ please,” Serena warned, starting to sweat. The sensei reached out and got her wrist in a vise grip.

The sensei stuck her stuff in a deep pocket of the white stola and pulled out a little dropper instead, which she used to drop one drop of fluid onto Serena’s hand. Then she let her go.

Egg came out from hiding. “What did you do to her?” Elaine followed.

Serena looked at them. First she saw Elaine. “Oooooh,” she said. She wasn’t looking exactly at her face, but above and around it.

Elaine checked for spinach in her teeth. (what is it?!).

Serena kept her distance from everyone and backed out of the room.

“You can keep the necklace,” the sensei called after her. She turned to Egg and Elaine. “I let her keep the necklace. Bibbity bobbity.”

The room was getting visibly darker. “Uh oh.” The sensei hurried over to the sacred flame and doused it in plentiful amounts of mineral spirits until it was burning high and bright, then shoveled more coal from the storage area underneath the flame.

“You’re the Vestalium Maxima,” Egg said.

The sensei bowed. “Shiuan Sláinte, at your service.”

“If the sacred flame never goes out why do you bring a lighter?”

### Time is on my side

Lemmy was stroking the shiv when they came for him, crouched in the darkest cranny of the hospital room, behind the bed. He had unscrewed all the lights and the room was stale and rank with teenage body odor. He was talking to himself. The harsh consonants and guttural vowels of ancien regime french piled on each other, echoing sourceless from the cold stone.

There were three women who came for him, one in white and two candy-stripers, and their eyes took time to adjust from the bright hallway before they spotted the telltale bremsstrahlung of the knife, spilling green over the white bedsheets.

Pulling on heavy gloves, the candy-stripers jumped across the bed and reached down to pull him up but he wouldn’t come, the angle was bad and he went limp so they couldn’t lift him.

The Sensei, one Damien by name, hung back by the door to read the situation. She patiently formed a plan as the candy-stripers fought in vain against Lemmy’s best tantrum strategies, retained from his misspent youth.

Finally Damien Sensei waded in. “Don’t let him stick you!” she yelled, grabbing his feet to drag him out. She finally got a good hold and he came, struggling the whole way, spouting filth.

“Ta mère suce des bites en enfer!” Lemmy shook his head wildly so they couldn’t hold him down, sending thick green spittle flying.

They got him up on the bed and hooked him up to the arms-and-legs shackles that were standard in the hospital here. Lemmy’s eyes darted between them and he hyperventilated through bared teeth, sending arcs of dark saliva onto their clean coats.

“We’ll need to combine our strength to get it away from him,” the lead sensei said. “Sorry about this, Lemmy. You’ll thank us in the morning.”

Lemmy’s grip was like iron, and they were at a disadvantage because of the gloves – they couldn’t get his fingers open. A porter wheeled in a heavy lead box on a cart but moaned when he saw what was happening. “Don’t look,” Damien sensei urged him. “Keep back.”

“Vous slime infidèle,” Lemmy croaked.

“Let us help you, Lemmy,” Damien said, bouncing as she tried to hold down his arm.

Lemmy’s eyes and head turned in her direction like a machine on a crank. He smiled. “I’m not Lemmy,” he hissed through grinning jaw.

“Well then let’s introduce ourselves. I’m Damien Sensei.”

“And I’m Napoleon Bonaparte,” Lemmy said. “Or close enough.”

“I told you,” one of the candy-stripers said, making significant eye contact with Damien over the shaking hospital bed.

“The IRB insists on proof,” Damien said. “We need evidence the college will accept as a sign of possession, like speaking in a language he doesn’t – um.” Damien started over. “Look, he’s not saying he’s some random soldier who fought at Borodino. He’s saying he’s _Napoleon himself_. When you’ve seen as many psychotics as I have, you realize that’s the same thing as saying you’re the devil.”

The bed stopped shaking for a second. “Seriously, test me,” Lemmy said. “I have all his memories.”

Damien and the candy-stripers reacted in an instant, going again for his hand and trying their hardest to pry open his fingers but it was no use.

“Should we call the dean of discipline?” candy-striper one asked. “She has the strongest fingers of any of us.”

Orderly two shuddered. “She eats this stuff up. It would be a disaster.”

Other furniture shook and wounds and stuff appeared on Lemmy’s head and forearms. Lemmy wept quietly through it and pleaded in the voice of an old woman, “Ceci est ma maison. Je ne vais pas nulle part.”

The porter had a pair of garden shears leaning against the doorjamb. “You want me to take his fingers off?”

“No,” Damien said, “there’s a standard treatment. Be ready.”

The candy-striper got a good grip on Lemmy’s fingers and then Damien Sensei ran straight for the big plate glass window, yelling “Take me! Take me!”, and jumped out, breaking it, and was gone.

Lemmy was shocked and relaxed his grip for a second. Orderly one got his hand open and number two plucked the shiv out. She dropped it into the lead box and the porter slammed the lid shut.

Lemmy’s color improved instantly and the bed stopped shaking. The haze of radon and BO around him lifted for the first time in weeks.

Nobody said anything for a while, all watching the window. Lemmy broke the silence, his voice back to normal. “So we’re, uh, all set here?”

The candy-striper, still in shock, undid his shackles. “Store that underwater, please,” candy-striper two told the porter, who wheeled out the box.

Lunch had been served hours ago but nobody had come for the tray yet. Lemmy cracked the jello pudding and demolished it, then wiped his mouth and stood up as candy-striper two collapsed in the uncomfortable hospital vistor chair, crying softly as the vinyl protested beneath her.

“Oh, look how late it got,” Lemmy said as casually as he could given everything. “I’ll nip out for a quick nightcap before the casinos close.” It was 4pm on the wall clock. He backed out of the room whistling a song about time.

As he walked down the hall to the elevator he blew on his fingers and, switching from french to latin for once, said softly to himself, “Alea iacta est.” As a six he could – and did – always win at blackjack; he had the edge over everyone, even the dealer. Lemmy had it in his mind to vig up some major loans.

Finally, with a sort of passion, as if abandoning calculation and casting himself upon the future, and uttering the phrase with which men usually prelude their plunge into desperate and daring fortunes, he hastened to cross the river; and going at full speed now for the rest of the time, before daybreak he dashed into Ariminum and took possession of it.

### Else Gwinner makes a run

Else Gwinner, a freshman with no prospects whom nobody liked because she was obviously not staying, ran away. She was caught by the division of New Model Army camped out in front of the city and, because of the direction she came from and her white stola, her trial was short.

Egg and Elaine went to the top of the wall to watch.

Else saw them. “Soon I’m going up out of this world. I’ll use fire.”

Elaine looked at Egg and mouthed “(is she talking to us!)”.

“It’s what you call dying and you’re frightened of it.”

Red-bloused, an inquisitor in matching red galero came to the base of the trial-platform, complete with stake, they had built for her. “But weren’t you going to tell me the answer to whatever the question is.”

Miss Gwinner came down from the stake to take the burning jack from the inquisitor and went back up. “First I’ll get rid of the dust on my feet.” And she put her shoes on fire.

Egg and Elaine, unable to watch after a while, went back to campus. At first they regretted not doing more for her but with time, forgot about the whole affair and moved on with their lives and careers.


	7. Honor and Obligation in the Aeolian Waste

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The kids' stillsuit fittings go better than expected and now they're on their way to ruined Tara, to fight the poisonous Coumadin and crown a new king.

### They stopped the moving sands

Egg Ween would not be fortunate enough to be granted a croak dream of her own but she had been having a very sweaty and disturbing dream featuring Birgitte Bardot for the last few nights. BB was trying to tell her something important but her volume was turned way down.

She was up before dawn from her dream and left her tent. It was cold in the desert, she wasn’t expecting it to be. She set up kindling in their firepit to start breakfast.

They had camped at the crest of an escarpment. Below, a carpet of parched hills carved by vanished water and endless wind braided themselves into the darkness and shifting dust.

Randall came out to join her, rubbing his arms through his coat. “Can’t sleep either?” Egg asked him. “Desert jitters? The wind kept me up.”

“I like it here,” he said. “Somehow I feel at home.”

“Don’t say that, Randall. Marathon is home.”

Egg struck a match and lit the kindling. She brought it slowly to her face, where it played its light against her skin, and blew it out, and at that moment the sun rose all at once on the horizon, the morning sweeping in over the dunes like ocean tide.

Vermin Sensei, who’d had enough of the ivory tower and decided to tag along, smelled breakfast and came out to join them. “This party,” she said, “could use a better chef.”

Randall covered his face and Egg spat as a blast of dust curled over the ridge.

Vermin tapped her ear. “They’ve seen our fire.” She pretended not to notice the dust but her nose wrinkled. Distant running drummed on the steep cliff face.

“Are we at war with them?” Egg asked her.

“As I understand it,” Vermin said, “it’s less of a war and more of a riot. When St Boniface cut down Donar’s Oak to make his church, or perhaps when the Cypress of Kashmar was felled for Mutawakkil’s palace, the Gauls started killing. Both trees were grown from branches brought from other worlds and could not be replaced.”

“So wouldn’t it be safer to turn around?” Egg said.

“Randall has to perform the four tasks and become their war chief.”

“But _why_ ,” Randall asked, as he had asked her many times since they took to the road. “Where are you getting this stuff? Even Morainn makes more sense than you and she kidnapped us.”

Verin started, “It’s written in the –”

“Caryatid Cycle,” Randall finished, throwing up his hands. “I know.”

“And in the Book of Coming Forth By Day,” Vermin said calmly, ending the argument as usual with a citation. “We can only follow.”

Freddy Christmas, the one-man-band traveling with the commercial expedition they had joined, rolled out from his bed under one of the wagons, blowing into his hands and rubbing them together.

“I thought deserts were supposed to be hot,” he said, staggering to the fire for a hot tea that he topped off from a minibar brandy. A sheepskin was over his shoulders like a mantle, and on a thong around his neck hung a winding-horn made from a bull’s horn.

“I’m freezing.” He nodded at Randall. “You want to throw around the football?”

“Sounds good,” Randall said. He disappeared into his tent to dig it out.

Long spears like brooms swept a wave of thick dust over the cliff edge, blinding them. “We’ve done it now,” Freddy said, sipping of his fortified tea.

“Stay close to the fire,” Vermin snapped.

Trampling feet and ululations circled them in the blinding sand. Then shadows, then armed Gauls, eyes and mouths hidden by blue veils. Some stood straight, others leaned on their spears.

One crouched comfortably and eenie-meenie-moed its spear at the travelers around the fire. The spear settled on Freddy Christmas. “That one,” the crouching leader said. Freddy downed his tea in one swallow and they dragged him off.

The dust cleared. Randall came out of his tent with the football. “Where’s Freddy?” He asked. He saw their faces. “What did I miss?”

Lance and Morainn came out as Vermin filled them in on the military groups of this region.

“Do we follow?” Randall asked.

“We have to,” Lance said. “This insult can’t be brooked.”

* * *

The kidnappers were camped at the bottom of the cliff. There was no way to approach in secret. Lance and the boys skipped and slid down the slope to its base. Morainn and Vermin Sensei hung back to provide cover fire.

Morainn made a ‘blow it up’ motion with her hands and some of the kidnappers fidgeted, but they held their ground. There was a cold firepit and beds made from local plants. Freddy made eye contact and shrugged. He was tied up and gagged but otherwise unhurt.

Enemy spears swung out and down in unison, stopping short of the ground, making a quiet ‘woosh’. They stepped forward and did it again.

“Did anyone bring a weapon?” Randall asked. Lance, of course, slept with his sword and had left it in his sleeping bag. Jacob already had blood on his shirt from a midnight snack. “Okay. I’ll go in first.”

There were only ten of them. Randall disarmed the first three and tossed their spears back to his companions. Jake bit his in half and they waded in.

Randall faced off against the one holding a spear on Freddy. “You’re the leader?”

“You’re unarmed,” the Gaul said, swinging his spear from the bound Freddy to Randall. “I won’t fight you. Take up a spear.”

“Great,” Randall said. He stepped in and slapped him, then took his spear. The lead Gaul fell down, shocked. Randall freed Freddy while he recovered. “What’s your name?”

“Coumadin,” the Gaul said. “Of the –”

“Good work,” Vermin said, cutting him off. “You’ve completed the four tasks.”

“Have I?”

They ticked them off. “Leading a successful war party,” Vermin said. “Taking an enemy weapon,” Lemmy put in. “Touching an armed enemy without hurting them.”

“What are we forgetting?” Vermin asked. It hit them all at once, Randall the hardest.

“Did nobody –” he was livid. “I mean, did nobody _find out_ beforehand if they had –” He threw up his arms.

“Breathe,” Morainn said.

“I mean, this is the only society _on earth_ with no horses? Is there another? I can’t think of one.”

“Take a breath.”

“No one can _ever_ become a war chief here!” Randall took one of the dropped spears and chucked it as far as he could, which was pretty far given the condition of his arm. “This is impossible.”

“Not impossible.” The voice was soft and clear and came from the blank ground. And then it wasn’t blank; a figure rose and brushed itself off, casually leaning on a spear. It was a woman, with huge, shocked green eyes and a red veil pulled back as a headscarf. She had an unusual combination of grittiness and glamor that contrasted and complemented the harsh terrain.

The colour selected for her uniform was ‘drab,’ as most likely to make her invisible in a land of dust. Lemmy nodded approvingly and thought her the only properly dressed light troop he had seen since coming here.

“If becoming a war chief is what you’re about,” she said, “there may be a way.” She noticed the defeated enemy leader and her lip curled. He was on his knees, forearms crossed over his chest, neck exposed as if he wished to be killed with one stroke. “Will you bring him?”

“Why? He’s beaten. We don’t need any hostages.”

“He’s your ghanima.”

“I’m lost,” Randall said.

Vermin made her way down the slope. “I’ll explain,” she said, wiping her glasses on her shirt but actually just mixing the dust with skin oil and adding more dust. “In the subtleties of the Fremen tongue, the word means ‘something acquired in battle’.”

Randall looked at Lemmy and they shook their heads together. “Pass,” they said. “Jinx.”

“You can leave him,” the Gaulish woman said, “but it’s a grave error of manners.”

Vermin shook her head. “God help the critic of the dawn.”

### The Cleitagora

The warrior woman gave her name as Videvdat of the Tarda clan, indicating her family’s ancient origin in the Afternoon, and turned out to be an Amazon. Over the next day and a half, she guided their horses and wagons down the steep face of the escarpment and then to her clan’s headquarters in the nearby Maeotian Swamp.

Vermin Sensei was bookishly interested in the history and culture of their order and took notes against her saddle as Videvdat explained, losing her temper at times, that the Amazons were to Ares as the Senseis were to Hestia.

Other Amazons rose silently from the different terrain types as they proceeded, joining the procession, avoiding Vermin, and baiting Videvdat. They deferred to her while also heckling her endlessly.

They were in the thick of the hot winds. Do you remember ever holding your face over a stove when it was full of fire? and the rush of hot air which choked you? Well, something of that sort, of vast volume and momentum, came quietly up, at first behind a wall of dust, and then with a roar burst upon them. It felt as if an invisible, colourless flame was playing over their faces, scorching without burning, and making their skin and hair crackle and stiffen.

Freddy Christmas, not built for temperature extremes, had been swearing for most of the second day. “Damn,” he said again when he finished his canteen of fortified water. “It’s hot as hell in here.”

“Yeah, man,” one of the Amazons said, chuckling, “but it’s a dry heat.” Most of their communication was in the form of allusions or running gags. The other Amazons laughed along. “Videvdat,” she said, “what will we sing when we feast?”

“We will not feast,” Videvdat said, marching with her eyes on the road. “Our guests have urgent business.”

“But we always feast,” another Amazon said. “What shall we sing?”

Videvdat’s eyes shifted, though her neck remained straight as she marched. “Let us sing the Telamon,” she said. And then, more quietly: “In honor of our guest.”

“A martial hymn,” the other Amazon said, approving the genre by pounding her spear on the crumbling stone road, a refrain the other Amazons picked up. “But let us sing the Cleitagora instead, given that we are women warriors and care little for the tales of men.”

“We should clap our hands just the same,” Videvdat said, practically chewing the words.

“An entire culture trained to military order,” Lance said, speaking to Morainn but his eyes on Randall. “What a priceless thing is here for an outcast Duke!”

* * *

The Maeotian “Swamp” turned out to be a network of bone-dry canyons and ventifacts, precarious wind-sculpted pillars and arches. The Amazons lived between, upon and within the stones and only the very center of their village had any sign of permanent use. Everywhere else their homes blended into the land.

Freddy Christmas was nearly sober from dehydration and the others were not much better. There was a rumored chain of Cold Stone Creameries in the desert but they had yet to see one. “First things first,” Videvdat said. “Let’s get you some proper equipment.”

She brought them to the village market, a warren of stalls and workshops in natural and worked caves in the rock, its aisles shaded by veils spread between the stone pillars. “Here,” she said, stepping into the cool darkness of a deep archway.

It was the stillsuit shop and they were measured there for stillsuits, a sort of desert wetsuit that captures one’s urine and sweat. The moisture accumulates in a small detachable bag which can be sold in the deep desert, where golden water is like silver and pure water is as gold. The sizes weren’t a problem, but the suits were hell to attach.

Randall had the least trouble with his. Morainn’s pituitary heroin covered her and Lance hydration-wise; they didn’t join the try-on session, instead hanging back and watching. Morainn’s turquoise eyes glowed in the dim, filtered light.

To the Amazons these were comfortable conditions; instead of stillsuits, they switched their camo for chaderi, a kind of full-body dress dyed with tasteful countershading.

“Hey,” Morainn said, catching one of the Amazons by the arm and pulling her over. “Who are they?”

A group of dark-robed figures, of various ages and sizes, their features in shadow, milled and muttered at the back of the shop, sipping hot tea by the gallonful despite the baking desert and gesturing at the kids.

“Dreamthieves,” the Amazon said after doing a relative threat assessment of Morainn. As Morainn opened her mouth to begin the interrogation, the Amazon shook her head and drew back. “Anything more you’ll have to ask them.”

Randall was flicking his sweatbag idly as the others struggled to shoehorn themselves into the neoprene. “What was that you were telling me about a ghanima,” he asked Videvdat.

Her eyes flashed. “I’m not your mother.”

The dreamthieves were upon her – three of them, one light and fast, one firm and tall, one bent and small with age. “What’s this about a ghanima,” the middle one snapped. Their faces were still in shadow.

Videvdat rolled her eyes and tossed her head like a captured horse but her feet were planted and she answered. “They were attacked by Coumadin’s band at the cliff.”

“Which of them?”

Videvdat gestured with tilted head and expressive eyes at tall, red-haired Randall. The three hooded heads snapped to him. “This one captured Coumadin?”

“Hardly captured,” Lance said, “and barely defeated. The boy broke his weapon early. It wasn’t much of a fight.”

“Disarmed him, eh,” the old dreamthief said, scratching the dry skin on her palm. “And that hair, and that height.”

“He knows nothing of our ways,” Videvdat said. “So what if he can fight? There’s more to jingi than fighting.”

“Rare for an Amazon to admit it,” the young figure said from her hood. “Still, what you say has merit.” A whispered conference. “You’ll teach him jingi.”

“I didn’t mean –” Videvdat tried to protest but a warning glance silenced her. There in the crowded room Randall had the distinct premonition that he and her would be thrown together increasingly in the Waste. It was an inevitable progression; but as he looked at her and saw her blushing, for she must have been entertaining the same premonition of inevitability, her face was obliterated and he saw only a fawn chaderi, smelling of perfume, and a pair of American saddle shoes.

“Boy,” called the old dreamthief. “Come to us now.”

Morainn had been listening and now spoke. “The Amazon told us you can make him a war chief.”

“Not us,” the old one said. “He’s halfway there on his own, but he’ll have to finish it on his own.”

“But how,” Vermin asked, joining the conversation. “You keep no horses here.”

Randall came. The dreamthieves sized him up.

“Prophecy,” one said. “The Book of Coming Forth By Day.”

“And the Caryatid Cycle?” Vermin asked.

“Those are your myths,” the dreamthief said. “We have our own. But he must fulfill them.”

“But I’m not one of you,” Randall said. “How can I lead you? I don’t know your ways.”

“Ways change,” the middle dreamthief said. It had the weight of something oft-repeated but freshly understood. “And with that hair –”

“You could be one of the Naakaii Dine’é,” the young one said. “The longest walkers.”

“I doubt it,” Randall said with a laugh. “Marathon is my home.” His smile slipped a little. “Timmy is my father.”

“And yet you feel at home here,” said a dreamthief. “I pray you are wrong, for if you have none of our blood, you will fail in your mission.”

“What mission?”

“To become a war chief,” the young one said. “I’m Amy.” She took off her hood.

“To go to Tara,” the stocky middle one said. “Ancient headquarters of the Tuatha Dé Danann. The hill where would-be kings are made and unmade.” She shook off her hood. “I’m Melange.”

“To suffer the prophecy of Ruadhan,” the old one finished. “To relive the true origin of our people.” She took down her hood and smoothed silver hair. “I’m Blair.”

“When you come back –” Melange said. “ _If_ you come back –” Amy clarified. “Videvdat here will teach you jingi, our code of humanity and justice.”

### Egg’s extra credit (part 2)

Randall left, and took Lemmy with him, but the Amazons feasted all the same. This much can be said for them: in those days, they knew how to throw a party.

There was drinking. Elaine, predictably a lightweight, was working on her third white wine and had recruited Egg Ween to translate.

(tell them), she mouthed.

“I don’t want to –”

(tell them!)

Egg sighed. “She wants to join your society,” Egg said to the curious Amazons who had gathered around. One of them encircled Elaine’s bicep completely with her hand.

(ever heard of Alyona?), Elaine said.

“No,” Egg told her.

(I mean ask them!)

“I don’t think they have either.”

(she’s like the russian joan of arc). Elaine hiccuped. (she’s my ancestor)

Egg sighed. “She’s named after the Russian Joan of Arc.” The Amazons nodded and started to back away.

(where are you going?)

“This is the one,” the middle dreamthief, Melange, said. “Why have you taken so long?” ancient Blair asked. “We sent a messenger for you months ago.”

(me?) Elaine mouthed.

“Get her out of here,” Blair said, kicking dust at her. “I can’t understand her.”

Egg smiled apologetically. (I think they mean me), she mouthed back. Elaine yelped and backed away from another dusty kick and went off to find herself a Zima.

“I didn’t receive any message,” Egg said.

“In your dreams,” said dreamthief Amy. “Birgitte Bardot. She said you saw her.”

“I saw her but I couldn’t understand a word. It was like she had a mouth full of marbles.”

The dreamthieves did the ‘of course’ gesture and nodded, relaxing a little. “Podcast voice. We should have foreseen this.”

“Who are these women?” Egg asked Videvdat, who had led them to her.

“The dreamthieves,” Videvdat said by way of intruduction. “The living representation of our people’s learning. The essence of our history, of a time before we became desert dwellers even.”

All this sounded great to two-drinks-in Egg and she followed them to their sanctuary.

* * *

Lance stood guard over Morainn in the rock shelter she had been assigned.

Again that shimmering grew about her hand and her person, although what rested inside was a very tiny jewel, swirling with opal colors. Lance flinched from it, for he knew the danger.

Egg’s penetrating questions and the dreamthieves’ commands echoed faintly from the jewel. Morainn smiled.

* * *

The dreamthieves’ initiation room was a kind of rudimentary sauna. Swapping her stillsuit for a robe of familiar terrycloth, Egg oohed and aahed and unwound some of the rough living she’d done on this journey. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply as Melange launched into the 101 lecture for this class.

“The effort to mold the incoherent and vertiginous matter dreams are made of is the most arduous task a man can undertake – much more arduous than weaving a rope of sand or coining the faceless wind.”

“But what the hell are dreams anyway?” Egg asked.

“Mysteries,” Amy said. “Incredible body hocus pocus. Knowledge deeper than the Sea of Stars.”

Blair cut in. “The truth is, we still don’t know what they are or where they come from. But we’re going to do this right. Lest you forget that you’re servant of us all, to you fall the menial tasks in this ceremony of the seed.”

Egg poured more water on the rocks and basked in the fresh steam. “Let it be as shai-hulud will have it,” she said. The dreamthieves nodded, happy with their new recruit.

“There is a land all dreamthieves have visited,” Melange continued. “It is a place where all dreams intersect.”

“I knew that from my books,” Egg said. “But why only go there by sleeping? It seems we could teleport straight in by –”

Blair interrupted with a harsh slap to the slick rocks. “Ask me not how dreams take substance!”

They narrated the meditative steps of entering Caer Arianrhod, the dream realm, and in a few easy lessons she had done it. The calming sweat lodge didn’t hurt either. They began to share their dreams and go for long journeys together in them.

The dream realm was basically like an abandoned version of the Maeotian Swamp and was initially a letdown. But as Egg examined her surroundings, she saw faces peering at her from the green shadows. She couldn’t place the time of day. At first she thought the sun obscured, but now she realized there was no sun in the sky at all.

“There are rules here,” Melange said. “For one – offers of guidance must always be accepted, but never trusted.”

“For another –” Amy said. “Nightmares. Normally they stay in people’s individual dreams but sometimes –” she shivered. “Wisps of power escape.”

“They attach themselves to dreamers,” Melange said, “and are carried here to become the dreaded bogles.”

“Bogles?” Egg breathed.

“Malignant, mischievous, or simply mindless impulses,” Blair said, “that will wreak havoc until the speaking of their proper name dispels them.”

The lessons continued with a practical demonstration that Egg did not enjoy. They dismissed her as the sky was turning light. When she was gone, Blair got out her calendar. “Where shall we three meet again?”

### A walk in the glass forest

TARA. When the Tuatha Dé Danann had ruled this place it was populous and the seat of power, but for reasons unknown to the rank and file of the Gaulish tribes, it had been abandoned since the year 564.

As with Mashhad the city was covered with a most dense mist but minus the radiation and sulfuric acid, and not permeating – it ringed the town like a wall, but once within, the air was clear, if dimly lit.

“What now?” Lemmy asked.

“To the center,” Randall said.

“Shall I come with?”

“Might as well.”

It wasn’t a large place but the plazas were littered with relics and doodads. The boys were surrounded by precious, complex objects of forgotten use – machines or sculptures excavated from ruined cities in the Rust Desert beyond Duirinish.

“Morainn said to keep an eye out for the Cleave Solis,” Randall said.

“The sword of the sun,” Lemmy translated. “Or sword of light. What is it?”

“She just said we need it, and that it had been here once.”

It wasn’t a large place; they found the center straightaway. A plaza with some fountains, surrounded by tall buildings. A nondescript weathered stele at the center, but every paver in the plaza pointed straight at it; the innermost tiles which touched it radiated outwards like rays of the sun. It was surrounded by a forest of glass sticks like bamboo.

“Just go in then?” Lemmy asked. “But who’s he?”

There was a Gaul standing in the glass bamboo, shaking and biting his lip. He didn’t react to them, his eyes were locked to the light from the glass. All reference points seemed to be withdrawn from him, to be replaced by a rushing chaos, the sense of an act of memory continually performed without relief.

“I think it’s not safe unless you’re from here,” Randall said. Besides the standing Gaul, there were bones in there, some still wearing the remains of faces. “And he has built illusions round him and sees no way out.”

“Are _you_ from here?” Lemmy asked.

“I think we’re about to find out,” Randall said. He took a step into the glass.

* * *

He lived in waking dreams, pursued by a past he didn’t understand, harried by a birthright which had no meaning to him; taunted by amnesia of the soul. His past and his present crackled in a lightning arc through his mind and he was no longer able to tell which was real.

He flapped loose like a torn sail until something in his blood communicated with something in the glass. He heard a voice underneath the wind and listened closer. He heard a phrase: “she is gone”.

And he remembered: being Duncan Idaho, and having rebelled many times; he remembered his last death, but that too only for a moment. He took another step and –

* * *

He was in Tara. But the sun was shining. It was daytime and there was no curtain of fog. As the tracking shot of Randall’s race-memory panned in from above, the central plaza was like a house of crystal pillars by the edge of an empty sea.

Gauls, tall and red-haired but without the spears and the camo, used handtrucks to load relics and artifacts onto sturdy wagons. Ageless Senseis, their botox-faces clear in the daylight, directed them.

There was something like a sword but he couldn’t make it out. It danced and shimmered, as if the eyes that made this memory feared to look at it. But then the crate was sealed shut and he could see.

“This will be needed someday,” the Sensei said. “See it goes out first and arrives safely.”

 _The Cleave Solis_ , Randall thought. He carefully memorized the address on the shipping label and hoped he’d remember upon waking. The crate was off in a pallet loader but Randall’s soul was detaching from this scene, dissolving back into the tuning-fork hum of the crystal forest, restoring enough of his volition for …

* * *

Another step, farther back in time. An escarpment, perhaps the same one he had clambered down to enter the Waste, but in this vision it was fresh – burning stone flowed at the base in the earth’s wound. Rushing gases blasted up from the rift, choking and quickly killing anyone who tried to pass.

Lightnings crackled on the threshold. Stormclouds black above made the whole scene like night.

More Gauls talking to more Senseis. “This is where you’d have us bring the relics? This is the sanctuary?”

“A harsh land,” the Sensei said, crackling an empty Poland Spring bottle.

“Please, tell me what you have seen,” the Gaul begged. “Show me that my children’s children will thrive here.”

“I owe it to you,” the Sensei said. “But just you, not your people. This secret is for their safety.”

He clutched her forearms. “Show me the prophecy,” he said. “Show me the Book of Coming Forth By Day.”

Randall sunk into his eyes and read with him.

“A lie?” he said finally.

“For the sake of the future,” the Sensei said. “This is how we operate. Your people will be programmed with a Bene Gesserit codephrase, waiting to serve the one who will come after.”

The Gaul left her tent. Randall broke free and the scene rotated back to 2D, then faded to static.

* * *

He dreamed constantly. Another step. An unreal, blueberries-and-lemonade sky swirling over an army of troll-orcs, shadowjacks, crypto-satanists and various worse beasts.

A human army held them back but lost ground. The host was too terrible, the odds too long, the day too dark.

Ageless Senseis of all genders worked to grow brittle corundum in pressure vessels from tiny seeds; it was the only plan they had left. It was only an initial leakage, but the longer they waited the more difficult the sealing would be.

The battle moved forward in skips and starts; the erosion of reality in this place made memory unreliable. Randall’s viewpoint jumped around as people died, fell, entered the field, and as his ancestor-affinity hunted for a good match.

The corundum was grown, and zone-refined, and cut, all as the human armies were cut to pieces by the monstrous horde and desperately defended the corundum workshop. Baron Saturday danced madly and tirelessly at the center, orchestrating it all, showering his regiment with plentiful PCP from a hose.

And finally the Senseis were done, and the corundum discs deployed, and the Baron and his top lieutenants banished to the phantom zone behind blood-red windows.

Thus the despiser was imprisoned within time.

The battle wasn’t over, the armies of the dead still ranged the field, but the sky had cleared and light-worshipping humanity had bought a chance.

* * *

Randall’s body, his blood, his very germ cells knew, but could find no language to tell him what his life had been like during the frigid lunacy of the Afternoon. Dark hints reached him. But the quivering fibrils of his nervous system were adjusted to receive messages dispersed a thousand years before, intimations faded on the winds of time.

He walked on, long ago having passed the Gaul in the crystal forest, until another pillar tuned itself to his blood. The picture cleared and he was –

On a quiet street, in a small but beautiful city, the architecture wondrous but also practical, the people polite and the streets clean.

He saw a sign – the language was strange to him, but one word, a name, he could make out: Sheol. But this place was no purgatory. Understanding was difficult when the knowledge of his ancestor’s ego-memory contradicted his own.

In those long-ago days just after the Moon was broken, the Chandra, once a perfect sphere hung in the sky, lay in fragments in the streets, its gleaming eggshell marred with globs of snake vomit.

The Senseis, attempting to squeeze the Great Serpent to produce ambrosia and amplify their power, had instead produced Halahala, a cosmic venom. Small wonder to extract poison from a snake, but there you go.

Randall’s ancestor approached one of the shell fragments. He was here to investigate dragging it outside city limits, but his metal hooks couldn’t bite on the perfect surface of the cosmic egg.

He was a low-caste servant. The servants were always over-fertile, so the Senseis reduced their pulse-rate, and their sexual inclination, by giving them cola to chew. This had the additional advantage of making them content to perform monotonous tasks day after day without diversion, but possibly not so great at problem-solving.

His chains behaved oddly when they brushed the purple venom – some links rusting, turning to powder, others turning rocky and crystalline like metal in raw ore, others turning cherry-red and soft.

The venom fascinated him. It called to him with a message beyond and beneath language. He touched it, just a drop on his finger, and it didn’t burn his finger. He brought it to his mouth …

“Mmm, spicy,” he said, and remembered dying, and being born, and touching the Lia Fáil in Tara, and a thousand images collapsing into an endless now. The whole can of film has descended on him.

Randall began to tremble. Pictures came to his mind rapidly, faster than he could consciously see them; sounds, smells, histories, overviews, impressions, even personalities of cultures and individuals. Time dissolved …

* * *

“Mmm, spicy,” Randall said. He stepped forward and his hand landed on rough granite. His vision returned to his own eyes, and his brain began to do the safe thing after a day of ancestor-visions, which is to forget them, frame by frame. “Shipping label,” he said to himself. “Don’t forget the –”

But he was there, at the center, touching it, the weathered stele, the Lia Fáil, the coronation stone. It was warm, comfortable. It welcomed his touch, vibrating against his palm, droning like waiting bagpipes.

Randall looked back. The other Gaul hadn’t made any progress. Randall sighed.

The stone’s hum rose to a roar that could be heard throughout the city, throughout the valley, throughout the waste.

He picked up a passed-out Lemmy on his way out, waking him with smelling salts and some water. Lemmy had been shopping during Randall’s trip through the memory palace. There was on the thin chain round his neck a peculiar silver medallion.

When they came again to the border of fog Randall stopped short of the edge. “Do you see it?” Lemmy shook his head, but to Randall’s eye the knotted ring of fog was a serpent, biting its own tail, ringing and enveloping the city and maintaining the endless drought in this place.

“Remember how long it took me to learn to whistle?” Randall said. He stuck his fingers in his mouth and blew, hard, and the piercing whistle echoed in the abandoned capital. He called again and something heavy boomed in the distant streets, taking heavy steps, roaming and searching.

Randall held out his fist and lightning crackled around it, first mere tinsel making silver veins in the air, then thick bolts grounding themselves between the loose pavers. Not exactly in sync, the approaching footsteps echoed like thunder, galloping now instead of walking.

The fog shifted nervously, its knots starting to flow. The dust blew in the streets. Lemmy sheltered in a sturdy entry-arch of a nearby warehouse.

The lightning danced and changed in Randall’s grip. Sometimes it had the shape of a rod, sometimes it dissolved into numerous branched candelabras.

The fog reared and for a moment it was a snake, hood flared like a cobra, forked tongue flicking, eyes with horizontal teardrop pupils rotating forward to see their prey. It gaped its mouth wide to show translucent fangs with dark channels to inject venom.

Randall raised the spear. It lost its shape for a moment, and as a sizzling arm of lightning grounded itself on a nearby manhole cover, the thunderous galloping rounded the corner and slid to a halt by Randall’s side in the battle. It was a war-elephant, blazing white in the overcast light with forked tusks to match the enveloping snake’s fangs.

It boosted Randall onto its back with its trunk. As the snake reared even higher, preparing to strike, Randall cast the lightning-spear with his ludicrous arm, going straight into the roof of the serpent’s mouth and instantly paralyzing its brain. As the lightnings lost coherence and discharged, creating real cracks and peals of thunder now, the snake’s eyes and teeth turned to ash and its flesh shriveled.

Randall slapped the elephant affectionately on the side, as if he knew it, or had once done. It seemed to recognize him in turn.

The elephant reached down and, heaving easily with its mighty trunk, levered up one of the heavy pavers. From beneath it, a geyser of water sprayed into the sky.

The snake’s carcass faded back into fog, which was quickly turned to streamers by the hot wind and dispersed. The moon shone and the stars twinkled above. Randall then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs, made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand. Geysers and fountains all over the city burst like fireworks and rained down to the streets, sluicing them clean and filling storm drains for the first time in generations.

Sometime in this the elephant had faded too, leaving only a half of a cracked eggshell sitting on the pavement. “Should we –” Lemmy prompted.

“No, leave it,” Randall said. “We may need him again.”

### Changeling

The whole desert knew that a king had been crowned, but not who, not yet. There was nothing to be done about it until morning. Randall sat quietly in his tent, comfortably alone, untired, a tiny lampflame bobbing as the oil burned.

Something lay across Randall’s lap, something hard to look at, something important, something dangerous.

The blue darkness and moonlit sand outside flashed when the doorflap flipped silently open, a shape silhouetted in the entrance. Closer, in the circle of lamplight, Randall saw the sheepskin mantle and bull’s horn and recognized Freddy Christmas.

“Is that –”

“Yes,” Randall said. “I teleported and got it.”

“It’s beautiful,” Freddy said. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

“I’m surprised you recognize it,” Randall said, getting to his feet. Freddy’s outline shifted with the bobbing flame, details and boundaries melting together. “In fact, I’m surprised you can look directly at it.”

Freddy writhed and rolled his shoulders as he endured his transformation. What he revealed was not that different from his daytime body, just rearranged – the sheepskin became a sheep’s face. The hanging horn became bull’s horns on his forehead.

“I liked Freddy Christmas,” Randall said. “I hoped he would be real.”

The sheep’s head turned, revealing Freddy’s old face on one side of the head. “He was, once.”

“He was a good musician.”

The head turned again, revealing the burning eyes and steaming mouth of a bull. “Thank you,” it said politely. It rotated again to a sheep. “He could have stayed as he was, guiding you.” Back to the man’s face. “But you, possessing that, cannot be borne.”

“Asmodeus, I presume,” Randall said. The demon bowed. “If you know what this is, then I know you carry a lesser version of it. I feel it on you.”

The demon’s hand brushed his belt. “That which you bear was fashioned as a weapon; and that – that is madness.”

“If anyone can wield it safely – it was fashioned for me to bear. It was made against this day, and for what’s to come.”

“There is danger that you might not feel,” Asmodeus said. “A thing one senses in the sound and feel of it … a limit of approach.”

“You’re my enemy. What do you care if I destroy myself?”

“A mistake would kill us all,” Asmodeus said sadly.

Randall held it by his side, not moving yet. Balanced like an ordinary blade, the crystal length within that sheath was rune-written with the secrets of the gates – for the sake of a successor, Morainn had told him once.

Asmodeus loosened from his belt a netsuke, carved from black coral, representing a small stone bound with iron chains. His belt pouch, unsecured, fell to the ground.

Randall drew for the first time. He found strange letters, the blade itself like a shard of glass – even touching it threatened injury. No blade ever existed of such substance: and yet it seemed more perilous than fragile.

“Perhaps that is its only virtue,” Freddy said. “That it is shaped as what it is … it is something that you can see and know exactly as it is.” Freddy grapsed the netsuke more tightly and hot crack fumes boiled out of him – from his three mouths but not less from his skin. “There is no ambiguity here, no yes and no. This thing ought not to exist.”

Randall observed him sadly. The blade went from translucent ice to a shimmer of opalescent fire. As he tapped his own pituitary crack, its power was inside the armor with him, was coiled about his nerves and his sinew. It crept within his skull and corrupted sight and reason.

They exchanged blows, Freddy’s bolts of antimatter and dark lightning grounded themselves in the sickening glow, hard to look at, of the sword.

The void still gaped within his mind, dazing him, as it surely must Freddy. “What else can I do?” Randall asked him. “It is made, and it cannot be unmade.”

“Save by the Witchfires themselves,” Freddy said between blasts.

“Save by that.”

Randall’s pituitary gland kicked into high gear, producing more fuel for the sword’s ultraviolet plasma. There was no real contest between them. All of Asmodeus’ attacks were neutralized by the sword. Randall knew he should end this, but remembered his good times with Freddy Christmas and couldn’t bring himself to strike a friend.

The tent had been blown away but they stood where they had started. For all the power of their attacks, they had made little noise apart from the odd snap or sizzle of the inverse lightnings turning sand to glass. Nobody had been roused, and the rest of the camp still slept.

Randall succumbed to the peace of the night and lowered the sword. Asmodeus retrieved his belt pouch from the ground and reattached the netsuke.

“You can leave,” Randall said. “I won’t chase you.”

“I’m known for lust,” the demon said, “but not for cowardice. And included in my lust is lust for battle and for victory. Caution is not a sin that I possess either.”

“It’s not a sin at all,” Randall said. He sensed movement behind him – a small object shot past him, hitting his assailant in the face. It was the silver medallion Lemmy had picked up in Tara.

The demon clawed at it as it sank into his flesh with a muffled hiss. Wailing, he staggered around, crashing into stone pillars and tents. Randall scrambled out of his way. On the threshold, Asmodeus got his nails hooked under the disc and tore it away with a wet, ripping sound.

He lurched out into the village, hands over his mutilated face. He made it a few steps and then he popped like a trash bag in a butcher’s back alley.

People poked sleepy heads out of tents and houses at the commotion. Randall realized he was still holding the sword. He sought its sheath and it became like fine glass again, slipping into its natural home. The cessation of that force left him drained, void, as if he had been gutted.

Randall wished he could feel something, sadness, rage, for the betrayal and loss of his friend. Why was he so unable to weep?

Lemmy sauntered over to retrieve the silver medallian from the canyon floor. “You doing okay? Who was that.”

“No,” Randall said, sitting back down in what had been the center of his tent. “No.” The little lamp was somehow still intact, its little flame alternately calm and distressed as the wind figured itself out. “I don’t think I am.”

The sword lay once again across his lap. He didn’t think he should keep it.

### Battles without honor and humanity

A week later. At the Altın Dal, a natural amphitheater that is a meeting place for the clans of the Gauls. The scene is timeless and has no color. The sky is gray and distant like it’s waiting for something.

The chiefs and their warriors and posses wait, a sea of heads, summoned by their clans’ respective dreamthieves, silent and still. The small rodents of the desert graze and forage at their feet, thinking them statues.

The three head dreamthieves clambered up to the mainstage and looked out over the faces, counting their counterparts in the crowd and identifying clans by subtle styles and ornaments. “All here?” Blair asked finally. “Looks like they’re all here,” Amy said. “I think that’s all of them,” Melange confirmed.

The traitorous Coumadin, who had his face covered but was near the front, cast off his cloak and climbed up to join them. “I petition to speak,” he said. He didn’t yell but he didn’t need to; the perfect natural acoustics of this place curled his voice into every ear.

“Belaka!” Blair snapped at him in their tribe language. “Kid rehak!”

“You know what this gathering is for,” Amy said, “and it isn’t for you.”

“As chief it’s still my right.” Melange made a fist to sock him in the gut, but Blair stopped her, and dragged the other dreamthieves backstage with her to watch. “This should be good,” Melange muttered.

“I’ve been to Tara and touched the stone,” he said without preamble. A collective gasp echoed through the bowl – again, not loud, but it didn’t have to be. Coumadin waited for its echoes to cross below the threshold of hearing, but they didn’t fade completely; the earlier waiting silence had something under it now, like leaky bagpipes in the next room.

“Look!” Coumadin raised his arms. His sleeves fell, revealing numerous gold press-on tattoos: figure-eights, Apep the river snake of the nile, gators.

Blair smacked her forehead. “They’re fakes! They’re obviously fake.” Amy growled “He never!” Melange made them look out over the crowd. “He’s hitting the mark. This will be delicate.”

“Gaulish clans,” Coumadin declared. “You have your first king.”

“The Gauls have no king!” someone yelled from the middle before their chief shushed them.

“Ask your chiefs,” Coumadin said, “and your dreamthieves. Ways change, and this has been long-promised to those entrusted with the prophecy of Tara.” He kept talking, but he was losing his audience. A tall, red-haired figure was climbing down the near-vertical wall of the bowl above the mainstage. The figure slid down the last few yards, raising a cloud of dust and an awful clatter.

The Gaulish nation waited in silence for the dust to clear and the echoes fade. It was Randall. “Enough,” he said in the silence. He shaded his eyes. The sun flashed over the far rim and poured gold into the rift, bringing warmth and color to the day. Sensing that their uncertainty would be resolved with a fight, the Gauls became happy and relaxed.

“Inglizenya tizarabdo?” Randall asked. A chorus of “Yes” and “Eweh” from the crowd. “Coumadin is lying,” he said. “I was the one who went. The stone roared for me.”

Coumadin took up his spear and laid it across Randall’s neck, slowly, avoiding sudden movements because he had lost the last fight, but still violating the peace clause in the Statute of Rhuddlan. He raised the arm not holding the spear and waggled it in the bright sun. “Look at my ink, now, in the light!”

Excited claps and hoots rippled through the crowd, warriors all who had been dreading the hours of mindless debate.

“Fair enough,” Randall said. “In prison, your life story is written on your body.” He grabbed Coumadin’s free arm and secreted pituitary crack, just a little. It was a cold morning but he was warm now, sweating.

The tattoos on Coumadin’s forearm flowed and merged into a long spiral, gold stained red where pieces of his skin were brought along. It crawled from Coumadin’s arm onto Randall’s. Randall wrestled him down and then broke his spear.

“Someone get this man a horse,” Randall said. He held up his arm, red and gold in a spiral, to the crowd surprised and delighted by this reversal. “I’m your war chief.”

“Now I’ll tell you what I saw,” Randall said.

The three dreamthieves rushed forward to stop him. The clan chiefs in the crowd struggled through the mass, knocking into people and apologizing, hurrying more than one should in a dense gathering.

“You can’t,” Blair said. It echoed throughout the bowl. “You can’t,” she said more softly, raising a curtain of heroin to shield their conversation from the listening Gauls. The chiefs arrived, shivering as they passed through the shroud of silence.

“Your whole religion is a lie,” Randall said. “They deserve to know.”

“All existence is founded on a lie,” the ancient Blair said, appealing to philosophy. “The lie defends us from waking up and proving it false.”

“You’re being used,” he said.

“There’s a reason would-be chiefs die in the crystal forest,” one of the chiefs said. “Have the Gauls been used? Very well. We have been created for use – but not to serve a lie.”

“Honor will not endure it,” young Amy urged.

Randall was unyielding. “You heard the stone roar. None of you could go back as far as I did. My ancestral ego-memories are the clearest. I was bred to access them.”

“This is your right,” Melange said, “but it isn’t wise.”

“This is their will,” Randall answered, “and mine.”

“You have the disease that eats at our world,” Melange said. “You cannot find peace in old conventions and beliefs, yet you are not sufficiently committed to anything to forge new ones.”

Randall stared her down, unyielding. She did a ‘fine’ gesture and dropped the veil, turning her back on him. He told the gathered troops what he had seen in Tara, the cosmic venom and the holy relics, the defeat of Baron Saturday, and the stuff about the Bene Gesserit codephrases.

“Our whole religion is a form of elaborate programming?” someone moaned in the back.

“Sorry, pal,” Randall said.

“If that’s true, are you even our king? If not divine right, by what right do you rule?”

“That’s your decision,” Randall said. “I won’t force anyone to follow me.”

Despair took ahold of the crowd. Some took swallows of tequila or other cactus-based spirits. The sight of a flask being decanted into a canteen of water reminded Randall of Freddy and made him sad.

“I won’t believe it!” Coumadin took a new spear from one of the shocked tribesmen and climbed the stage again. “I challenge you! For the destiny of my people.”

“Coumadin!” Amy snapped back. “Not here! Remember the Statute of Rhuddlan. Remember the Oath of Peace.”

“Do not wound when hurting is enough,” Coumadin said. “Kill not where maiming is enough. I have forgotten nothing, but –” he spat – “ways change. This would-be king means to destroy us.”

Coumadin raised the spear high. “For our destiny. Who’s with me? Raise your spear!”

Knives and spears went up, violating the Gauls’ sacred law by drawing steel in this place. Not a majority, but a good amount, enough for a real scrap.

“Checkmate,” Coumadin said to the gathered chiefs on the stage. “What does your side have?”

“Fight him one-on-one,” a chief begged of Randall. “It’s the only legal form of combat in this place.”

“I’ve already defeated him twice,” Randall said, waving the broken end of Coumadin’s first spear. “And anyway, I’ve just remembered – I’m not your boss yet.” He sat down heavily. “We haven’t drank sake together. I don’t have any obligation to you.”

Old Blair smacked her head again. “Videvdat!” she called out, summoning the Amazon from the crowd. “Did you teach him jingi after all?”

Videvdat shrugged. “I substitute-teachered it – played him a bunch of old videos. Jingi Naki Tatakai, Adab Al-Tabib, you know the drill.”

The chiefs dispersed to the crowd, and in a few minutes, warriors were raising fists in the air to match the count of the opposing spears. One of the chiefs returned. “See? There. We have raised the cry. They are asking you to call out Coumadin and assume command of the tribes.”

Randall wrapped blankness about himself like a bandage, and did nothing, thought nothing, recognized nothing. It was like this that he faced Coumadin for a third time, immune to his hatred and tricks.

Their third battle went much like the first two; Randall disarmed him and broke his spear. In the bowl, Coumadin’s army clashed with the Gauls loyal to Randall. Lemmy had command of a group which he had split into infantry and cavalry despite the lack of horses.

During the scuffle Morainn and Lance had joined them on the stage, with Lawyer in tow. They watched the violence and experienced a thought, or the memory of a thought from others who had witnessed the first blood shed in service of empire, that was neither the largest or the last skirmish in what would be a long war.

“You have told us the end of all things,” Lawyer said. “Now help us. Laugh.”

“I have,” Randall said, “of late – but wherefore I know not – lost all my mirth.”

The allied chiefs returned again to the stage. “Victory,” the senior surviving chief said, “though not without cost, and a group of them has left the field to fight another day.”

He handed his spear, butt-first, unceremoniously, to Randall. “Take it.”

“I have it. Now what?”

“We are the assegai siswal, the spears of the ancient doab, your spears.” Randall raised the spear; the assembled fighters in the bowl raised theirs, silently, their hearts unchanged for all that they had pledged their lives to combat. Nothing had changed; they were born with a spear in hand, born pledged to combat. They would die pledged to combat. Randall nodded and gave it back, butt-first.

“That’s it,” Melange said. “You’re the Dhul-Qarnayn now, our war chief.”

“He still hasn’t captured any horses,” Vermin said.

“We don’t keep horses,” Amy said. “We dropped that clause.”

Lemmy scrambled onto the stage, out of breath, and someone handed him a battered tin cup of lemonade. “They’ve no boots,” he muttered into the cup.

“Hmm?”

“Prisoners sir, we took them prisoners, the entire garrison.” They stared at him. “No that’s not true, we killed some. Too many really. I’ll manage it better next time.” He buried his face in the glass at the end.

“There’s been a lot of killing one way or another,” Randall said.

“No,” Lance said, “hardly any.” He tossed down his cigarette and stubbed it out with his boot. “Yet.”

Morainn stared at the cigarette butt for a second and then shocked him a with a psychic pulse.

### Those who guide and are guided

A temporary peace assured by their victory, and Coumadin and his commanders on the run, the team moved to travel ASAP to the site of their next (and last?) battle.

Dreamthieves Amy and Melange came to see them off. “No Blair?” Randall asked.

Amy shrugged. “Blair saw the prophecy made flesh in the battle yesterday. She thinks you’ll be our doom.”

Randall tried to smile and swallowed a lump instead. “I’m not anyone’s doom,” he said hoarsely.

Melange sighed. “You won’t destroy us in anger. Genghis Khan wasn’t angry at us when he destroyed The City. Neither was Tamerlane or Nadir Shah or Baber. And I’m not downcast because we’re doomed to be destroyed again.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s inevitable. We go on building while we can.”

Randall saw a piece of sharp flint that looked nostalgic or familiar to him, the same feeling he had felt since coming to this desert but much stronger, and picked it up.

“I threw that flint there,” said an old woman’s voice. “No wonder you found it.” She introduced herself as Nokomis, and claimed to have known Randall’s mother, but not his father, and said they were related. An old man, weak and failing, giving his name as Nomikos, joined her. “I’ve lost my keys,” he said, looking knowingly at Randall’s pocket. Randall, feeling a slight weight, checked and found them there. “Here, do you want –” The old man shook his head. “You keep them for now.”

“Are you sure you won’t need a mount?” Jacob asked Lawyer, having some plan that if Lawyer needed his larger horse he would get Bella.

Eyeing him with a sad amusement, Lawyer hefted his huge sack over his shoulder, and looked ready to travel as fast as any horse.

Vermin led at first; finally she did ‘tada’ hands and indicated the thing she had brought them to see: a round stele, taller than giant Lawyer, covered in megalithic graffiti and circuit diagrams. It was anchored to a pedestal at the bottom of a round amphitheater area of steps, made of minerals arranged to mimic the colors of a prism, red to blue. Randall dismounted with her and they descended the terrace levels to the monument.

“So you’ll secrete heroin into it and then boom, FTL jump?”

“Not me. You’ll have to do it.”

“‘I can go anywhere’, eh?” he said, eyeing the rainbow steps. His extra senses experienced the geometry of space here as if he were being made into a quantum croissant, folded and blended until the layers were more wave than particle. The monument was a trig pillar that would let him navigate that endless continuum.

There were thousands of glyphs. “This one is our home reality,” Vermin said, pointing to a large symbol at the base that looked like a 3-phase delta transformer. The one she wanted looked like a semiconductor diode. After a few minutes of hunting for it, Randall got up and stretched. “I don’t think this is a good idea,” he said. They rejoined the others.

The obelisk’s upper tiers told the entire history of the First-born, written in plain language and illustrated with frescoes, but they hadn’t brought a ladder and missed it.

“Achtung,” Morainn said to Vermin in ancien regime french. “Elektrofischscheuchanlage.”

“Hochspannung.” Vermin shrugged. “Lebensgefahr.”

“Why can’t we teleport directly there?” Lemmy asked. “Like how you got the sword.”

Randall shook his head. “To jaunte it’s necessary (among other things) for a man to know exactly where he is and where he’s going, or there’s little hope of arriving anywhere alive.”

Morainn nodded. “It’s as impossible to jaunte from an undetermined starting point as it is to arrive at an unknown destination.”

Lawyer cleared his throat politely.

“Blood, bowels and brains,” Lemmy swore.

Egg clapped her hands to refocus them. “So what are we left with. Can we fly there?”

Lawyer cleared his throat politely again.

“No direct flights,” said Vermin, who had thought of this already and who hated transfers because she always checked two bags.

Lawyer cleared his throat less politely and they let him speak. “I have something that may serve.” But he had to unpack his whole luggage to find it. It was carefully wrapped at the bottom. They spent most of the afternoon at this.

To Vermin, it resembled an old-fashioned Japanese pillow, with its neck-receiving curve. The base was forked, however, like the handlebars on a bike. She all but drooled when she saw it. “A clavicle. Only three exist.”

Lawyer nodded. “This is what a gate opener uses to dilate the Way manifold.”

To Randall, it looked like a divining rod with a radar dish attached.

“We’re burning daylight,” Lance warned. He had given up his usual regimen of beers for tequila and it had made him ornery. “Does anyone know where to find a gate?”

“The clavicle can tell you where a gate is to be opened,” Vermin said.

Lawyer shook his head apologetically. “Only in part; you must also sense the point, and tune it to that desired world.” He hated to contradict anyone and was shaking and nodding at the same time. “There is as much of what you would call intuition as calculation.”

Lawyer stared at the others. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something. Finally Randall made an ‘after you’ gesture and Lawyer got it. “Ah – follow me.” He winced at the attention.

Before long they were on the trace of an abandoned road. A weathered street sign marked the turnoff with a magenta trefoil hazard logo on blue background. “We’re here,” Lawyer said, but his polite obedience was gone. He sounded angry.

They followed him to a canyon wall carved with faded ancient reliefs, and as they hunted for another trefoil, Lawyer narrated how this place had been before the drought.

“On the border of the river there was wood very much, on both sides: every kind of tree; its leaf withers not; all months does it ripen; its fruit serves for food, and its leaf for healing.”

He was all but singing. “In the shadow of the branches thereof shall dwell all fowl of every wing.” His tone changed. “And strangers, the terrible of the nations, have cut him off, and have left him: in all the valleys his branches are fallen, and all the people of the earth have left him.”

“Found it,” Vermin said. She enjoyed this sort of archaeological hunt more than she would admit.

They clustered around her. Lawyer caressed the eroded lines of the relief. “The Lost Road,” he murmured. He took a deep breath and chanted: “I lift this clavicle to worlds without number, and bring a new light to the Way, opening this gate that all may prosper.”

A laser shot out of the clavicle dish and the faded carvings rippled into a whirpool tunnel of liquid spacetime. “Quick!” Lawyer yelled. “Before it closes!” The gateway sucked wind and clawed sand from the floor of the canyon. Lawyer flopped in Sliders-style. “Follow meeeeee,” he called as he spiraled away into the tunnel.

The rest of them had horses and it was going to take a while.

* * *

The inside was like an M. C. Escher drawing but Lawyer mostly knew where to go and it was actually pleasant compared to the deep desert and having to trade their pee for sweat.

After a day or so of travel, Lawyer led them to a plaza and another faded and pitted bas relief.

“This is a dangerous time,” Vermin explained as Lawyer prepared himself. “If it gets out of control, the cupola encloses us and smooths out the disturbance.”

Lawyer nodded agreement. “If that happens, we are forever lost to the Way,” he said. “We go wherever the aborted gate takes us, and we cannot come back. Do you feel that potential?”

Lance rode up from rearguard. “I think you should hurry,” he said. Lawyer nodded and resumed his work.

“Is it –” Morainn said.

“What’s that sound?” Jacob asked, whose ears were sharpest.

“What do you hear?” Egg asked, as they all moved closer to the wall.

“So round, so red, so sweet,” Jacob said. But they could all hear it now: a mad voice on the wind.

The voice cackled: “… yet I thy white and red praise more and more in my sweet lady’s cheeks since they be shed when grapes to full maturity to tend so round, so red, so sweet …”

“Hurry up,” Lance said.

“Don’t rush me,” Lawyer said. He was fiddling with the clavicle but the exit wall was still just a wall.

The wind grew stronger and the voice louder: “… all joy before continually I long for them therefore to suck their sweet, and with my lips to touch …”

“I’ve got it!” Lawyer yelled.

“… fair purple crisped folds sweet-dewed and tender whose sweetness never wears though moisture weareath sweet ripe red strawberries …”

They piled through, even the horses willing to go through this time rather than meet the singer of the song.

Between one step and the next, light exploded around them. Half-blinded, Randall skidded to a stop, his horse stepping on his heels. He turned and saw Lemmy standing behind him, rubbing his eyes. There was a wall close behind them.

“Can it get out?” Morainn snapped.

Lawyer shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“I’ve heard old songs about gateway barriers like this,” Vermin said. “Ancestors be praised the songs were right.”

They heard the end of the song as the vortex spiraled shut:

“… whose heavenly sap I would desire to suck; but Loves ingender a nectar more divine in thy sweet Pap!”


	8. Back to the Garden

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No country this to sheathe the sword. Egg and Vermin do hits of Morlock blood. Goodness in the valley. Fools' approval stings and honor stains. Lilith does a PSA on intervention in backtime.

### No can defense

Anything can happen. Anything is possible and likely. Time and space do not exist. On a flimsy ground of reality imagination spins out and weaves new patterns.

In the land called Shinar by outsiders, its original name corrupted to Shumeru by the second civilization to flower there, a mountain, a plain, a barren land once rich, bounded east and west by the tracks of dry streams, the rank north wind panted and stained the soil like a predator’s breath.

The new wind, rushing blindly out of the east under a cavernous overcast, brought black obscurity to the settlements, whose streets were now full of flying chemical ice blown in from the Deep Waste.

The acid wind eroded the stones of Shinar’s long-suffering fortress-town Dardanellia, razed once by the forces of darkness and rebuilt. Atop the city’s rampart, the wind chased through the partition to chill a sweating Randall, who was receiving military instruction from Lance.

To warm up he had been working through a series of poses chosen more or less unconsciously from the range of dominant stereotypes. Now they were doing balance.

“Wait without thought,” Lance said, “for you are not ready for thought.”

“So the darkness shall be the light,” Randall replied, completing the formula, “and the stillness the dancing.” This wasn’t their first time doing these exercises.

“The progress through the complete series of forms comes about of itself,” Lance said.

Randall was bored with their usual practice. He wanted something new. “What was that you were doing on those stumps over there?”

Lance pretended not to be too interested; he didn’t want to spook his pupil. “What, crane technique?”

“Could you teach me?”

“First learn to stand, then learn to fly,” Lance said wisely.

Randall thought about this and it made sense.

“Nature’s rule, Randall. Not mine.” Randall went back to practicing his usual step, strike, step. “But done right, you can’t defend.”

Randall didn’t like the sound of that. “They can’t defend or _I_ can’t defend?”

“Life,” Lance continued, “is like a long journey with a heavy burden.”

Randall had some idea of what he was getting at and wasn’t in the mood. “No country this to sheathe the sword,” he said, putting a pin in this topic for now.

* * *

Ingmar, the commander of the garrison here, invited them to his military council. Giant Lawyer came too, whom the locals delighted to greet in ancien regime french with “Que sera ti wancho”. A lot of ritual greetings are in the old tongue.

The visitors didn’t know what this war was about, and the locals didn’t remember. These people were always at war, an endless campaign they called the Asif, its origins buried with their lost history, its end hidden in their murky eschatology. Offense and defense had blurred together in the litany of strike and counter-strike against the mutants of the tainted north.

Randall and Lance came in, grabbing towels at the door. Admiring eyes strayed from maps and action reports when Randall stood his sword in the corner. Even with its hilt emblem smashed, it was beautiful.

Lemmy joined as well. Seats were brought in and so was the tea. The officers listened to his talk of the fortress and the position of their army, round which he had ridden. Ingmar remained silent, and his expression was so forbidding that Lemmy addressed his remarks chiefly to the good-natured battalion commander.

“So you understand the whole position of our troops?” Ingmar interrupted him.

“Yes – that is, how do you mean?” said Lemmy. “Not being a military man I can’t say I have understood it fully, but I understand the general position.”

“Well, then, you know more than anyone else, be it who it may,” said Ingmar, insulting and demoralizing his careworn cabinet.

### Secret cloaked by secret

Deep in the fortress bowels, Egg tottered down the narrow, high-ceilinged aisle by the jail cells. The second security gate whined and slammed behind her. “He’s past the others,” the guard had said. “I put out a chair for you.” She saw it at the end of the hall. One of the prisoners clambered over the bars of his cage, heckling her.

She had made Elaine wait outside; the prisoners would eat her alive.

The last cell was thick glass instead of metal bars. Within, two voices conversed in the shadows.

“Who’s back there,” Egg called.

“Just Patrick Fein,” one of the voices said, louder. “Just we ourselves.” He stepped into the light and stood patiently, clean, groomed, centered. “À votre service,” he said, and then something else in a strange and Southern French.

“May I speak with you,” Egg asked, her voice controlled.

“You’re one of theirs, the ivory tower,” he said.

“I am, yes.”

“May I see your credentials?” She showed him her ring. “Closer please.” He had been smiling the whole time, but it was weird now; a little too wide. “You’re not a real Sensei, are you.”

“I’m still in training at the tower.”

He stood on tip toes and smelled the air holes to his glass cell. “You use Evian skin cream,” he said. His smile got wider, weirder. He was enjoying himself.

She slipped a rolled-up survey form through the airholes. He examined it. “You think you’ll dissect me with this bland little tool?”

“I thought your knowledge –”

“You know what you look like to me with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube. A well-scrubbed hustling rube with a little taste.” He looked her up and down. “You could only dream of getting out, getting anywhere.”

A loud wailing and clatter echoed in the corridor outside. Patrick Fein’s eyes became a little less certain and flicked to the side. Then his smile was back, but his eyes strained above.

“You fly back to school now little starling.”

“Mr Fein –”

“Our time together grows short. But I’ll give you a chance at what you love most.”

“And what is that, sir?”

The clamor outside burst through the double-gate of the cramped jail – morlocks, flooding into the narrow aisle outside the cells. Egg blasted them with maser fire but she was still too new and they kept coming, trampling the smoking ribeyes that had been their clone-siblings.

“Don’t kill her,” Fein commanded them as they broke through his plexiglass cell and hoisted him out their shoulders as if he were wearing wolf pajamas. To Egg, just before she passed out from the heroin in her intolerant cells, he whispered, “Advancement, of course.”

* * *

Vermin Sensei was there, examining the carnage. Egg came to her senses sitting in the chair in the hall. She gasped and started to struggle to her feet.

“Stay down a bit,” Vermin said, not turning around, maintaining her study of the cell walls. “You nearly OD’d there. We felt it upstairs.” Vermin knelt to retrieve the rolled-up survey paper. “What’s this?”

“A psych panel,” Egg Ween said softly, pressing her palm into her temple. She had a headache coming on.

Vermin glanced at the paper. “His brain has not only been washed, as they say. It has been dry cleaned.” She turned the page and shook her head. “He serves those whom he hates, and is obsequious to those whom he despises.”

On the wall, someone had painted long lines of text in a harsh, jagged alphabet. Vermin touched the screed, still wet, and brought her fingers to her lips. “Yup,” she said. “That’s a taste you never forget.”

Egg levered herself up and hobbled into the cell. She took a bump of the paint. She coughed. Vermin watched her. Egg let herself really taste it and gagged. She rushed into the aisle and started to dry heave over a trash can. Vermin nodded. “Morlock blood.”

“He’s just a carthaginian weather god,” Vermin went on. “Tastes change, I guess.”

“What?” Egg asked between retches. She was pale and dripping sweat.

Vermin scribbled something in a notebook held against her thigh. “Here’s a question for you – how did the morlocks develop their own language so quickly? And writing no less. Do they have schools?”

Her round, owly glasses glittered in the torchlit carnage. “Did their tongue emerge spontaneously after they were engineered? Or was it given to them by their creator? Is it Baron Saturday’s own language,” she whispered, “and perhaps older than ancien regime french. An eternal container of the most ancient secrets.”

Vermin pointed to a section at the bottom that was just slashes. “The true name of Ba’al, the soul eater.” She looked up. “He was just another thunderer. He wasn’t an enemy until we needed one. You could say we have been his creator as much as he was ours.” Reflected light on her glasses hid her eyes so Egg couldn’t tell if she were fascinated or terrified. “The lie defends us. But even the lie is our doom. What worse truths can it hide?”

### The waste land

The sickness of the land and the sickness of the addiction growing in Randall’s blood felt like a unified thing as the group left behind the dry margin where the Dardanellians kept back the toxic foliage with controlled burns, and penetrated into the humid swamp.

A constant chill was with him always, and whenever he opened his being he could feel the slow, steady leakage in the Shield above him. It would be most noticeable in this land, he reasoned, since the Dung Pits of Glyve lay directly beneath the Shield’s apex, the sphere. Perhaps the effects had not yet been felt farther south.

What rooted, grew twisted and strange, from the trees to the brush, the shoots of which were tormented and knotted, the leaves of which were deformed and often curled upon themselves.

No longer maintained by human will, the Barrier between Dardanellia and the shadows beyond had weakened. Their most ancient of enemies now gnawed at the edges of yet another world, poisoning the land, sucking health from the air.

“Cold things grow hot,” Lance said. “A hot thing cold, a moist thing withers, a parched thing is wetted.”

“What’s that?” Nimue asked him.

“An old, very old description of this place.” His eyes were far off and reflected the hot red sun balanced on the hills.

Something reptilian slithered on four legs, whipping serpentwise into the thicker brush. It had been large and pale, leprous in color. They could still hear it skittering away.

“The enemy does not know what he is doing,” Morainn muttered. “Are there many such abroad?” she asked Lance, who had hunted in these woods as a youngster.

“The woods are full of beasts of his making,” Lance said. “Some are shy and harm no one. Others are terrible things, beyond belief.”

“They are not made,” Morainn said, “but brought through, from places where such things are natural.”

Randall became uneasy with the impression that there was something stirring besides the wind that cracked the rotten branches, something large and of weight; and he strained his eyes and hearing and held his breath to see and listen to what it might be.

Lance noticed as well, and noticed Randall noticing. “These are not natural beasts,” he said, and abruptly drove his horse into the deeper swamp-jungle. He came back a moment later. “But they can die by natural weapons.” But he loathed the blood of waste-things upon the clean steel.

“We can’t repel them all day,” Lance said to Morainn as the others gave wide berth to the death-cries within the tangle beyond their narrow trail. “The one I left dying will summon more.”

“Soon,” Morainn said, her attention on the ground in front of her.

“ _How_ soon.”

She looked up. “Necessity,” she said, dropping into lecture mode. “Ananke, the avatar of inevitability, compulsion and need. Twin and mate to time, mingling together in serpent form as a tie around the universe.”

The oppressive humidity lifted as quickly as the curtain of AC in a Florida gas station. “Ah,” Morainn said. “See? No problem.”

Beyond was still a sullen sky, the color of a bruised plum, but before them spread a deep valley overgrown with luminous vegetation. The ruins of a white walled city lay in the valley’s folds. Vines had almost consumed it, a hundred years of pearly silence in the garden behind the world, but enough remained to show its ancestral resemblance to all the other cities they had seen on their way here.

### Valley of the jolly green …

They descended the valley into the city, or what was left of it. Buildings in various stages of collapse made the town a maze. Grass made a common carpet of the streets and the shells of buildings, except in a few places where chalky cobblestones were left exposed.

They found a main avenue and followed it to its termination at the center of the town, the square shell of a hall or temple with the bones of its collapsed dome strewn within.

Though there were no trees here, no seasons even, there was a mound of damp leaves piled at the base of a standing section of ruined wall.

 _Ho, ho, ho_ a voice whispered on the wind. Their heads snapped up, everyone but Morainn. Lance spun to find the source. _Ho, ho, ho_ , an echo.

The damp leaves coughed, a throaty cough that made the pile jump and wafted diapers and rotting fruit smells. It tried to rise but only lifted gnarled claws above itself, which then fell back down, spent.

“Ho, ho, ho,” the heap said. Two yellow eyes under wild brows of brown leaves rolled open, glowing like the harvest moon. “Is that a pizza?”

Egg was eating a snack of bread and cheese and sliced tomatoes, but hardly a pizza. “What?”

“Is that a pizza?” it asked again.

“No! It’s just a –”

It cut her off. “I hope your pizza tastes like shit!”

“Ignore him,” Morainn murmured, leaning down to pick a discarded banana peel out of the pile, ignoring or not noticing the smell of decay. “It’s the guardian of this place. He’s very old and his wisdom is lost to us.”

She walked past it into the collapsed temple. The others followed, giving the trash heap wide berth.

Within the square wall, fluted buttress fragments lay askew amid scattered curved bricks, some of it hidden beneath the invasive thick grass. The footing was uneven.

At the center, a wide, round lip of masonry ringed a helical staircase, spiraling inwards, downwards, into a well of tan bricks.

“I can’t see the bottom,” Nimue said. “Something’s in the way.”

“I can,” Randall said, mesmerized. Morainn’s eyes flicked to him and then back into the well.

They all of them leaned in to look down into the drained well. Dry concrete, brown edged, and the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, and the lotos rose, quietly, quietly. Randall’s inner eyes were flooded with waves of light. The surface glittered out of the heart of light, and he saw others behind them, reflected in the pool. Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

Randall looked back uncertainly to Morainn, but she was all grim purpose now. “Yes.” So they descended, carefully hugging the wall though the stair was wide. It wasn’t slippery, though some stones were loose; whatever substance had shone with reflected sunlight and vanished wasn’t water.

The stair narrowed near the middle and their pace slowed. Lance, who had the rear, passed forward a rope so that they were bound together like a class of kindergarteners on the sidewalk. If one of them fell, they all would go, and this sense of solidarity bred a courage that alleviated Nimue’s nauseating fear of heights. The others were fine on the stairs and resented the delay.

At the bottom, the daylight filtering in from overhead as in a cave, on a clean floor of smooth, warm tiles, two objects lay in a dilapidated pile of sandalwood that had once been a shelf or a table.

One was a horn, silver-bound and old and much cracked, with inscribed text. The other was a sort of thin hockey puck or large pog striker or marble coffee coaster, inset with the sign of a yin-yang, or a black-and-white cookie.

Lemmy, more or less acclimated to radiation from his knife, was the safest one to approach strange objects. He sighed and went to take them up. First he slung the horn around his neck, reminding everyone uncomfortably of their dear lost Freddy Christmas.

But when his hand hovered over the disc Morainn said, “Stop.” Lemmy stopped. Her eyes went to Randall, locking his gaze, and she nodded, and Randall went to get it. He held it clutched in one sweaty hand, its different icing-halves melting at different rates.

“Can you tell what it says?” Morainn asked Lemmy, who was studying the text on the horn.

“It’s old,” Lemmy said. Egg rolled her eyes. Nimue muttered “We _know_ it’s old, it’s in the middle of a ruin,” and started up the stairs.

“I’m having some trouble with the translation,” Lemmy said. “It’s a tricky dialect, older than what I speak. As old as I’ve ever seen.”

Lawyer, who had been quiet and everyone had forgotten was still with them, made the giant equivalent of a shocked gasp. Morainn, who was living this scene as the culmination of a fevered premonition, expected nothing less. “Is it –” Vermin said.

“Got it,” Lemmy said. “‘Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.’”

“It’s the Cor d’Ivoire,” Lawyer said.

* * *

A surprise was waiting for them when they climbed out of the well. The guardian, no longer a slumped leaf-pile, was walking around, clearing rubble and planting seeds from little paper packets that he tore open. They had pictures printed on them of what would grow, mostly tomatoes and carrots.

Morainn stood before him, looking up. He was taller than giant Lawyer. “What happened?”

He was by no means fully restored. He was autumnal, leaf-bare, his teeth creased and pitted. Solemn, and still a dying thing; bearded, mantled, huge. His harvest moon eyes were sunken and bloodshot. His breath came short, and his voice rattled as he spoke.

“Long have I waited, patrolling the ruins of Babylon. It is my role to serve those who come here,” he said. “It was the attentions of living mammals that woke me up.”

His voice creaked and groaned like the torture of tall trees by the winter wind. When he shut his mouth at the end, the snap was like the felling of timber. They all jumped, and Randall reflexively opened his hand, dropping what he was holding.

The guardian watched as the black and white disc fell, turning over, and landed unluckily on one of the bricks. It snapped, predictably, on the weak seam between black and white.

Morainn rushed over. “We really need you to put this back together.” But she didn’t try to touch it.

Randall gathered up the halves and fit them together. The edge was uneven. “There are pieces missing.”

“You’re going to have to make those pieces look like they should’ve originally,” Morainn said urgently.

“I don’t think that’s my job,” Randall said. Then with more confidence, “what you’re asking is impossible. It has to be something else.”

“They won’t notice the broken seal,” the tree-guardian creaked out, “assuming you were in character.”

“They?” Randall asked.

The guardian looked at Lemmy, wearing the horn. They all did. They realized again what he bore. “What plan will you follow now?” Randall asked him.

The air and space above the broken seal in Randall’s cupped hands began to crease. He put it gently on the ground, and the phenomenon continued, like the slow-motion shattering of a mirror fractally intersecting our space.

And of a sudden came a low wailing that grew to the bright, clear peal of a horn.

In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, many arms of fog arose, braiding knots around them, crowding the group back towards the spiral well. The fog bank’s inner wall made a shifting bas relief like the border of a school of fish, individual forms weaving below the surface, figures familiar and meaningful but impossible for the eye to separate.

At the edge of his perception, Randall saw a grandiose and rather evil vision of armies marching and counter-marching through the mists, and men dying by hundreds of thousands, and all for absolutely nothing, and questioned his role and fate.

Finally one figure became real, emerging within or between the ropes of vapor like a boxer climbing into the ring, homeric hero becoming split-man as he assumes individual reality.

It was Birgitte Bardot, to whom Egg waved, her podcast voice still incomprehensible, her on-and-off boyfriend Guadalcanal mooning at her heels.

More came: Pocahantas and Mulan dragging a struggling Ariel between them, her gills breathing in the terrible oxygen, her tail useless on land but heavy, serpentine, threateningly scaled and finned.

Arthur Hawking wheeling his younger brother Stephen, ready to wield the stored-up star-force imprisoned within the terrible pressure of his fist. They noticed the broken seal, its lightning forks of shattered silver glassy and still in a frozen instant.

“It must be allowed to finish,” Stephen chanted in droning monotone.

“Can you help?” Randall asked.

“We can advise,” said his brother Arthur. “We who are condemned to repeat the lessons of history remember them best. But all of the debates and the political conventions are behind us now. Our fight is over.”

And they kept coming. Now real historical figures were plucked from their moments in history. Great war leaders: Joan of Arc, Lincoln, and the Khan. Great outlaws: Billy Bonney, Socrates. And great dreamers, explorers of the soul: Beethoven and Freud.

Randall walked among them as if he were in a library of resurrected heroes of Gallic and Veilish descent, searching for the book that would let him pass his final project. He almost asked Lincoln for advice, but he saw the peace in his eyes, the depressed contentment in the set of his heavy jaw. Instead he went to the Khan, small, alert, haunted, decked out in anachronistic armor from his sojourns in time. “What is it like to be bound to the horn?” he asked him.

The Khan loosened his bow. “The rending pain of re-enactment of all that you have done and been,” he said. “The awareness of things ill done and done to others’ harm which once you took for exercise of virtue.” He swept his arm in an arc, including his fellow souls, the living people, and the reanimated guardian indiscriminately. “Fools’ approval stings and honor stains.”

“But you won your immortality through glory,” Randall said. “Surely that honor doesn’t stain.”

Freud adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose. “For you,” he said, “they eventually vanish, the faces and places, with the self which loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.” He sucked on his pipe. “Return me to the ocean, I say.”

But Arthur Hawking carried something, a gift. “We have taken from the defeated what they had to leave us – a symbol.” It was a tight triangle of fabric, a flag folded up. Receiving it formally from him, Randall felt like he was in a military funeral. “A symbol perfected in death.”

The day was failing. In the disfigured street they left him with a kind of valediction and faded on the blowing of the horn.

As if their return to Valhalla triggered a turning of the seasons, the guardian had transformed again. Now he had the youthful aspect of spring, gawky and lanky like a sheared sheep or a dog after its first haircut. The dead leaves had dropped and were replaced with vivid green buds ready to bloom.

There was a bounce in his step as he roamed the plaza, planting more seeds, shoveling and putting up netting. His eyes, still a shocking orange, were healthy and bright.

### Killing of the tree spirit

The twinned halves of the broken seal were gone; vanished in the commotion of the summoning and dissipation of the heroes. But there was a new heaviness in the air, a fading in the distance that wasn’t fog or darkness, but some fundamental change, a thickening of the air, a sound below hearing, a weight.

The last shreds of fog from the horn lurked around the edges of the ruins, giving the abandoned city the aspect of a victorian garden before dawn.

Time unraveled like the slipping of film between reels driven at unequal speed, and when it was taut again, two new figures that hadn’t been there suddenly were.

“More souls bound to the horn?” Vermin asked.

“No,” the guardian said, his voice no longer creaking, but now the rushing of wind in leaves and grass, the playful gargling of water.

The figures walked out of shadow. One wore a bowler, but when he looked up his face was horribly burned. He had a striped christmas sweater with rips in it, not from wear, though it was old, but from getting dressed with knives on his hands. His companion’s face was covered; his whole body was covered by a black leather gimp suit. It had a hole for the mouth but he was wearing a ball gag.

Though foully attired the burnt man with the bowler was well spoken. “Not souls bound to the horn,” he said, with a half bow to Vermin Sensei, the blades on his fingers snicker-snacking. “We of darkness are said not to have souls, such as you are alleged to possess. We do, however, live many times, by means of a process which you cannot share.”

“So always is the resurrection of the dead,” Vermin said. “It is sown in corruption.”

Jacob, in better touch with his dreams than the other boys, was the first to recognize him. He got Lemmy’s attention. “It’s him.”

Lemmy pointed it out to Morainn. “Unlikely,” she said. “Baron Saturday is bound in Sheol, in adamant bonds infrangible.”

The burned man gestured, and one of the broken halves of the disc was in his hand. “Not as infrangible as they used to be,” he said. “But _I_ was never bound.” He made it disappear again. “And call me Ismael.”

“And your companion,” Morainn asked.

“Bechdel,” he said. “This is Bechdel.” Ismael patted his leather-clad companion on the head as one would a pet. “Can you see it breathing? It’s been dead for over 4,000 years. And it’s hungry.”

Bechdel started forward. It said something around the ball gag, but between the hoarseness of long imprisonment and the fact that its mouth was full, there wasn’t much chance of understanding. It held out one hand, palm down, and Morainn’s eyes went wide. Lance felt it as well, through their psychic link: pure pain, growing steadily in intensity.

Egg, standing next to Morainn, was next. She went down to her knees. Randall’s eyes blazed, but Bechdel, masked, didn’t see and was undeterred. “Stop this,” Morainn said. She launched a fireball but it clanged off Bechdel’s energy-shield like hail on a tin roof.

Elaine dropped instantly as the expanding field hit her. She lay limply on the ground, blood leaking from her ears, possibly due to an unrelated condition.

Bechdel said something again, but once again was foiled by the ball gag. Ismael shook his head. “Savage,” he said. This wasn’t his preferred kind of torture. His tastes leaned to the existential.

“What did he say,” Morainn asked. Her teeth were gritted and there was strain in her voice.

“‘I like it when the red water flows’,” Ismael translated.

Lance rushed forward and started batting at Bechdel with his sword, but it bounced off the energy-shield with great echoing shrieks like bell-peals warped through echoing halls. Bechdel giggled and chewed out another phrase. “‘It’s no good’,” Ismael translated.

“Stop this.” It was the guardian. He strode out with his buds at the height of springtime and as he faced Bechdel, they burst into the blinding blooms of summer. Gentle fragrance girdled him as he walked. A dusting of perfumed pollen yellowed the ground in his path. Fruits of promised ripeness hung from his boughs like swollen buboes.

His soothing fragrance seemed to comfort Morainn, and allowed Egg to get to her feet, and Elaine stayed passed out but may have been breathing easier. The full brunt of Bechdel’s attack shifted to the guardian, who bore it.

He reached out with his rough-barked arms and his fingers split once into twenty slim branches that dove into the earth like roots. They came up inside Bechdel’s energy shield, binding the leather-clad figure, bringing it down to its knees, budding yellow flowers that yielded copious pollen.

Bechdel retaliated with fire, blue flame that dried the vines around it in bursts of steam and then traveled back up the guardian’s arms, opening up irregular sores on his body that showed hypnotic red coals pulsing beneath. The guardian fell back. Bechdel got to its feet and resumed the direct pain stimulation of Morainn.

Bechdel’s ball gag popped out, releasing a wave of perfume. Elaine, still unconscious but ever-sensitive, sneezed. Flower petals drifted out of Bechdel’s mouth, and then vines. Buds, then branches, burst through its leathers.

Morainn rushed to the guardian’s side as Bechdel was consumed by the plants. “How is it?” the guardian asked, his whisper the pitter-patter of rain on leaves, the dropping of acorns.

“You did well,” she said, smiling through tears. “You’ll be fine.”

“Don’t kid al-Khidr,” the guardian said. He tried to smile but coughed weakly instead, his green skin decaying to white and brown, blood and sap congealing on the handkerchief Morainn brought to his mouth.

After a while Morainn stood.

“Who are you?” Randall asked the remaining enemy.

“You know my name,” he said, bowing respectfully to Randall as this was the first time they had met in the flesh, or at least in this flesh.

“You haunted our dreams,” Randall said, “and now you’re tormenting us here, but Baron Saturday isn’t free. Who are you then, if not him?”

Randall stepped forward, and Ismael stepped forward, but Morainn put herself between them. Still it was as if Ismael had Randall by the chin and was inspecting his face. “They flutter behind you, your possible pasts.”

“But _who are you_?”

“Don’t tell me you don’t remember me,” Ismael said, “’cause I sure as heckfire remember you.”

Randall barely remembered who he was in this life even. A boy had slung harp on his back and ridden after Morainn from Camelon. It was a tired, older youth that walked beside her now in the dusk and observed things in silence.

Randall began the complex preparation of self-hypnosis that would allow him to fight in the coming battle. The image of fire defined the void. His spirit burned, sunk into the abyss of what it was now touching: the radiance of the eternal sun.

In the meantime Ismael told his biography. It always fell to him, as the one with the longer memory, to teach this history before they fought.

“I am sure now that I am immortal, though I have no idea of where or when my life began. I no longer believe myself to be human. Did you think you were the first to ask questions, to experiment with the fabric of reality in this wretched place? Before you were born, I was here, wrestling with the enigma.”

Vermin had her book out and was taking messy notes against her thigh.

“But I discovered the reality of cyclic time,” Ismael said. “Inside the bubble we work what we will and we shift and change. But there is no escape. Our boundaries are our boundaries.”

“You’re wrong,” Randall said, more because he knew it was his role than out of any investment in Ismael’s argument. He had only lived once, not even once fully; cyclic time didn’t bother him.

Ismael nodded. “You’re right that it needn’t be this way. Join me. My master will have us prick the bubble ourselves and finally obtain our freedom from this endless round.”

“I won’t –”

Ismael cut him off. “Don’t answer. These are just the preliminaries. _This_ won’t be the change that will bring about the change. But to fight at your side again. Do you remember when we found books that discussed in sanguinary detail the infinitely varied methods used by mankind to shorten the lives of enemies? Til then who knew the force of those dire arms.”

“At my side? But we’re enemies. I assume we were enemies in my last life too.”

“Not always,” Ismael said. “Some of our modern aspects are reversed from what I remember. Though it was you who put me in the aeon sleep at the end of our last encounter. And now, of course, he –” Ismael nodded to confirm who he meant – “he intends you to be my final foe – he chose you to destroy me.”

This part of the script Randall knew. “With a will, my lord.” He stepped closer, though Morainn was still between them. “All of time’s causality rests in me. That is my weight in the web of time – the youngest and the oldest of us, in one, and I reach outside. In me, every causality meets.”

Ismael and Randall drew closer still, an aging universe hungering for their meeting so it could be renewed.

But Morainn stood up to her full height between them. “Stop.” She assumed the kamehame pose to attack. “You’ll have to go through me.”

Randall shook his head, sensing this was futile. Lance, psychically leashed to her and unlikely to outlive her very likely death, said softly, “No,” recognizing a moment he has long foreseen, but she didn’t hear.

### Intervention in backtime

Morainn’s gray eyes had a smile in them. Her botox brow told the truth for once because this was the doom she feared and now that she was in it she felt strangely at peace.

“I didn’t come here to fight you,” Ismael said.

Morainn’s calm cracked a little. “You must. This is the moment.”

“Wait a moment,” he said.

Reality bunched and creased again, and from the pleat emerged one who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing white light folded, sheathed about her. Raven hair and eyes familiar to the boys from their dreams. Her style is new but the face is the same as it was so long ago.

“Yes,” Morainn said, “this feels right.” She squared off and assumed the kamehame pose again to start her attack.

“I’ll give you a moment,” the newcomer said, “to say your farewells.”

Morainn nodded. So she turned her back on the enemy and faced the others, those she had gathered and brought here, some who followed her through psychic duress, others recruited in ignorance, but all now understanding the battle and sharing the bond of fighting side-by-side.

“All shall be well,” she said, hoarse. She cleared her throat. “And all manner of thing shall be well, when the tongues of flame are in-folded into the crowned knot of fire, and the fire and the rose are one.” Each of them thought it was a message to them specifically; it named all of their symbols and it would give them strength to fight on.

She also spoke quietly just to Lance. “I wish thee well,” she said softly.

“Must you die?” he asked.

Her gray eyes went strangely gentle. She took the pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, tapped it, and put one his his mouth. “If I have the choice,” she said, “I shall not. But if I do, then thee is not free.” Butane streamed from her thumb and she lit him up. “Thee knows what thee has to do.” The nicotine might sustain him through what was coming.

For the third time, she assumed the kamehame pose.

“I’m Lilith, you know,” the dark-haired woman said. “I was there the last time. Careful with that.”

“Which last time?” Morainn said, trying to concentrate on her preparation steps. “With what?”

“With what you wield. Intervention in backtime could affect whole multiples of lives and actions.”

Morainn continued to accumulate her chi between her palms. The coherent center of the time eraser laser became visible to the eye, a diamond point spinning and glittering with scintillating light. “You won’t distract me.”

“The whole of reality warped and shredded,” Lilith said. “It began with little anomalies, accelerated massively toward time-wipe, reaching toward the ends of Gate-tampered time and Gate-spanned space.”

“Might-have-been and Was were confounded,” she continued. “We went mad,” she confessed, “perceiving things no longer true, remembering what had never been true in the worlds which now existed. Time ripped loose about us – from ripplings to vast disturbances, the overstrained fabric of space and time came undone, convulsed, imploded, hurling all our reality asunder.”

Morainn’s hair came loose, floating around her head with static electricity. She had trouble speaking. “So … what.” Charged to capacity, she began to shape her hands into beamforming configuration. “It’s my … only weapon against you.” Lightnings grounded themselves in the grass. Warm air swirled around her. She had the sweats, her bones were cold, her teeth grew loose, her heart got really really hot, and the fallen bricks by her feet hummed like bumblebees. “It only has … one counter.”

“Yes, I know.” Lilith bowed. “Checkmate.” She assumed the same pose.

“I’ll wait,” Morainn said, “for your levels … to match mine. So there’s no …”

“Collateral damage,” Lilith said.

“Yes.”

They released at the same time. The beams annihilated each other and they both began to glow oddly and take on negative colors. Lilith toppled in the overgrown ruin and blinked, growing confused. Morainn smiled tearfully at Lance, and saluted Randall, with a playful wink at the end. She had rejected the myth he had offered her and adhered to her own.

As the last of her rippled away like ink dissolving on a still lake, Lance sat heavily like a puppet whose strings have been cut, the light gone out of him. A large part of his mind went when she did. Only time would tell if he could recover. The lines and figures on his marvellous robe writhe and shiver like tortured animals. Geometry remembers, though he may not.

### Call me Isa

Time the destroyer is time the preserver. Like the ragged rock in the restless waters, waves wash over it, fogs conceal it; on a halcyon day it is merely a monument, in navigable weather it is always a seamark to lay a course by, but in the sombre season or the sudden fury, is what it always was.

The shattering of the seal eroded the gates and walls of time. Baron Saturday’s ichor seeped into the universe, filling hourglasses to bursting, violating the black hole information paradox, bringing up buried secrets from the ground.

Randall, time’s champion, had his full power returned to him by this new refutation of time, all the skills of battle that he had learned in all his lives, his antique privileges. Forgetting, as always, the Prime Mover of the gear, the viewless, voiceless Turner of the Wheel, he took the role of savior on himself, forgot all doubt, and stepped forward.

For Ismael, whose eyes turned always inwards, waiting for the chaos within to cohere to wisdom, his past life memories became clear to him like looking through a hundred feet of glassy sea at noon and seeing the reef below in stark focus. Not just the previous life but all previous lives. He regained his understanding and dark purpose and, knowing how this must end, stepped forward.

Something passed between them, a facing-off of dance-partners who could read the subtle cues of posture, a signal made efficient a thousand avatars ago, a reaction to the unraveling of reality that made this battle possible, an instinct as undeniable as the larva’s call to metamorphosis.

They stepped close together.

Ismael’s palm tightened on Randall’s shoulder and they vanished in a shower of ash and black lightning.

Silently, they were elsewhere – not on TV or in a dream, but high up, the snow-blown slopes of the world-mountain: Olympus, Etna, Meggido, the rangeless peak piercing all horizons, a reminder to all that power operates through destruction. The air was still, waiting, the wind stuck between instants as time held its breath.

“Do you remember our last meeting?” Ismael said.

Randall’s memory was denied to him, the trauma of his last death blocking recollection. “I remember pieces,” he said finally. “A dream, maybe. You called yourself Iblis.”

“The great mourner, the sower of confusion. We met on the slopes of the sinai before your departure.”

Details came to Randall, out of order, as his mind’s eye avoided the moment that spewed this mountain from the planet’s bubbling gut. “Why did you refuse your master’s order to bow to me?”

“The command was a test,” Ismael said, but with haunted voice. He had repeated it many times in his long life. “I passed.”

“But you were punished. You were next to your master in power then, and now you are a demon, condemned to fire.” He took stock of him. “I can see the smoke coming off your flesh.”

“Better to be made from fire than mud. But this form is temporary.” Ismael had the desperate conviction of faith. “My love for my master is the thing that doesn’t change.”

Ismael’s pasts floated up from the illuminated reef. He saw before him all the centuries of heaped deaths, tallying up the corpses, seeking his own counterweight because no feather would ever offset his soul, because in trading for immortality he had given up his turn at the scales.

A voice spiderwebbed down like lightning, prying apart the air and space, planting a message directly in their speech centers.

_Any trouble, boy?_

Ismael looked up, surprised but not afraid. “No, old man. Thought I was having trouble with my adding.”

_All right now?_

Ismael put his hand on Randall’s shoulder. “Yes.”

“Who are you,” Randall asked.

“You know my name.”

“But _who are you_ ,” he asked again. “What are you to me?”

The answer would take too long, and depended on the outcome of the battle. “You once said that you were always changing masks,” Ismael said, “so that finally you didn’t know who you were. I have only one mask. And it is branded into my flesh.”

“Why can’t you speak clearly? Why can’t you –” something came back to him – “ _ever_ speak clearly.”

“The causality of cyclic time is irreducible. I do my best.”

“The continents quake and tremble,” Randall said. “Time waits for our conclusion.”

“Time is no longer a factor,” Ismael said, but then he nodded, and they began.

At first Randall left his sword sheathed because it felt theatrical compared to the other weapons at his disposal: lasers, phasers, ICBMs, a rainbow of particle beams, abandoned space-based weapons woken only to immolate themselves, sarin gas, pocket universes where flesh turned to pudding.

Minutes passed or years. He didn’t tire but he ran out of ideas, and began to think deeply, assuming just a little of Ismael’s philosophical nature and seeing that even his greatest attacks were theatrical too. He assumed a stance and prepared to draw.

Ismael’s eyes shone as he considered his imminent release. “It’s almost painful to be near you.” A sword, not made from night or lightning but just ordinary metal, was at his side now, waiting to be drawn. “At the same time, it is enticing.”

So they fenced. This didn’t draw on their mystical energies, which were endless in this battle, and so they sweated and tired, and took breaks, and experienced something like the flow of time in the limits to their endurance.

“Why didn’t my mystical attacks work on you?” Randall asked during one such break.

“As always, you’re limited to pituitary crack,” Ismael said. “It’s a clumsy method compared to the swift path of evil thoughts.”

“But the sword is no better. You answer my every form with its perfect complement.”

“Perhaps we are the same person,” Ismael said. “Maybe there are no boundaries. Maybe we all flow into each other, boundlessly and magnificently.”

Randall shook his head, wishing to hear no more. This was the trauma he had forgotten.

“Give me your hands,” Ismael said, placing his sword gently on the ground. “It’s not necessary, but it’s safer this way.”

Randall stepped back. “I don’t want to.”

“It’s too late. There is only one path, and I will accompany you.” They touched. “I will obliterate myself and merge into you.”

Randall, suddenly weak, dropped his sword; it landed point-in in the shale, for another hero to find.

“Don’t be afraid,” Ismael said. “I am your guardian angel.”

The place in Randall’s left side ached unbearably. Now he realised that he had been stabbed a second time, close to the original wound. The only survival would be a merger of opposites.

He was beatified, dissolving in his own light. Repository and symbol, he released all the energies of the two realities colliding within him: and in releasing them released the earth.

The long night ended. The reins of time were cleansed, freed, to reassemble a new physics if they found a path to do so.

The day/night terminator approached him but this place wasn’t quite right.

So Randall gathered himself up, in a sense alone now, his wounds aching in the cold. He chuckled, and ignoring the weather, moved to an even higher spot, exposed to the wind, where he could see the sky, lightening, warming, and lay down in what had been his grave, which he could remember now, and curled up like one waiting to be born, in the very center of it, where the dawn found him out at last.

### Afterword

What we call the beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

The vision recurs; the eastern sun has a second rise; history repeats her tale unconsciously, and goes off into a mystic rhyme; ages are prototypes of other ages, and the winding course of time brings us round to the same spot again.

But we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.


	9. Postscript

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Why write a Wheel of Time parody with detailed research into sources?

## Hints and breadcrumbs

I saw an RJ interview where he used the word RAFO, an acryonym from his fan boards for ‘read and find out’. I imagine him as someone with a deep love of hints and an aversion to saying things straight out too soon.

There’s a Brandon Sanderson interview where he cites the family’s wishes and says there are [three questions RJ didn’t want him to answer](https://www.tor.com/2013/01/23/brandon-sandersons-wheel-of-time-answers-from-torchat/) and so he won’t.

I don’t know if RJ intentionally left breadcrumbs for a project like this, but his style choices gave me an in. In particular his ear for names – when a name-sound and a plot match up with source material, to me that suggests a link.

If you think about it, ‘True Source’ and ‘Two Rivers’ are synonyms in a few ways, and hints to care about where ideas come from.

In Revelation, breaking the seven seals is about opening a scroll. It’s about literally unlocking knowledge, or figuratively the hard task of interpreting the information in a book. Break all the seals.

## All genre is fanwork

Recently I read [The Secret History of Dune](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-secret-history-of-dune/), a short overview of Frank Herbert’s inputs to Dune – a range of sources including Islamic theology and environmentalism.

The reviewer also notes Herbert picking up ‘two of Dune’s most memorable lines’, as well as a bunch of plot, setting and vocab, from The Sabres of Paradise, a non-fiction book about a war between the Caucasian Imamate and the Tsars.

RJ didn’t just borrow details from Dune for WOT – he also borrowed Herbert’s method of direct allusion by borrowing. This is unsurprising (all good fiction has sources and allusion), but allusion is even built into the universe of WOT: where ages repeat with small changes, ancient characters and concepts are spun out into the plot from storage in the dream realm, and ‘memory turns to myth’.

There are a few single lines from RJ that are great, but which I never successfully tracked down; rather than finding one source for them, it felt like they contain many of his sources rolled together.

The lines are ‘death is lighter than a feather, duty heavier than a mountain’, and ‘the lie is our shield’ (about Ishamael). The latter is, I think, the only line I took directly from RJ in this work. To me it was a gateway to understanding the gnostic sensibility in WOT, the layers of reality and the foundational / ambiguous role of evil.

While researching, I found a Brian Aldiss line calling sci-fi a “new language coined for the purpose of giving tongue to the demented twentieth century”. WOT feels to me like RJ had that in mind, and assembled the books that expressed it to him, and then combined them into a single work that could channel all that madness.

## Memory turns to myth

‘Memory turns to myth’ on page 1 isn’t random or for effect. It’s a mission statement, and a description of his writing method. I suspect the line resonated for a lot of his readers; I know it did for me. His setting feels familiar in a way that feels strange. It’s past and future at the same time.

I think WOT is a major 20th-century work of esoteric fiction and will gain a literary reputation once people forget about the TV show (which has not yet aired as I write this).

When I think of RJ I think of a guy sitting down with a stack of books and movies at the beginning of the 80s and constructing a deep web of allusion and secrets. Some of those secrets are derived internally from the mechanics of his world, but others make sense only as references to other texts. In places, he reverses the moral value of his sources to mask or enrich the eerie familiarity of his setting.

This is what makes WOT esoteric literature: the keys to its meaning are hidden within the text or external to it, but never on the surface. This goes beyond the typical self-referentiality of genre fiction – WOT is a universe that makes no sense without external guides.

My need to know what he meant by his metaphysics drove my hunt for his sources. Given how mechanical he could be about some things, the mysteries felt intentional, and when I couldn’t resolve them by going inside, I dug outside.

This fanwork may not be esoteric fiction because its truths, if it has any, are thinly veiled in the age of Google. Call it instead ‘eso-porn’, easy reading that rides in the draft of an esoteric work.

If someone created a simulation to re-enact variations of a story, it might be constructed like WOT. I like his subtle but consistent use of avatars or incarnations to carry out the plot. His layered universe constantly breaks the fourth wall because the pattern and the world of dreams _are_ the fourth wall, libraries from which concepts are ‘spun out’ into the main reality.

## Sources and signoff

I haven’t published an index of all my sources and where they’re used. I encourage you to look up lines from this work to find out where they’re from, but maybe don’t publish your findings – at least not for a while. Even if these books are 20 years old, let some journey of discovery remain for future readers.

I didn’t decode nearly everything. He spent decades while this parody was cooked up in a few months of my spare time.

I think I had a solution for “I win again, Lews Therin” and forgot it; I think the portal stones have some relevance that I found and lost as well.

Collam Daan feels like it _should_ be obvious but isn’t. A warping of Camlaan? Colliding beam accelerator? A reference to Atlas? Every so often I read through a list of historical particle accelerators just in case.

For research, tvtropes.org was surprisingly comprehensive. My sources for Callandor, Balefire, the warder bond, and Rand’s obsession with pain all came via tvtropes. So did partial sources for the Ogier and Ta’veren.

I suspect that the person who will get the most pleasure from this project is me, the author. That’s fine and I think is the way of these things. The first 7 chapters have a grand total of 67 views as I write this. If a 68th person enjoys it, would love to hear from you in the comments. Even better, write your own ‘source parody’ of WOT or something else, and comment here with the link.


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